


Veni Vidi Vici

by LilyGardenia



Category: Naruto
Genre: ALL THE POLITICS, Alternate Universe, BAMF Haruno Sakura, Character Study, Clan Politics, EXTREME SLOWBURN, Elements of fantasy, Gen, Ghosts, Gods and Goddesses, Haruno Sakura-centric, Mythology - Freeform, Not Canon Compliant, Strong Haruno Sakura, Tagging as I go, Village Politics, You Have Been Warned, ability to see ghosts, canon wtf is canon, daimyo politics, eventual MultiSaku, heaven hell and all the other (earthly) realms, shinobi - study, shinobi vs. civilian, we also have a dragon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:49:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25066444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilyGardenia/pseuds/LilyGardenia
Summary: By all appearances, Haruno Sakura was a paper ninja.One day, she won't be.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 133





	1. Part One, NIGHTFALL [ updated: 2021.01.22 ]

**Author's Note:**

> An umebaka, also known as a sutebaka, is a burying (or dumping) grave in Japan. Unlike a mairibaka, or visiting grave, bodies buried in an umebaka is abandoned by their family members. (Source: p. 168, “Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan” by Nam-lin Hur, pub. 2007)

##  **☾** **Veni Vidi Vici** **☼**

LilyGardenia

Category – Anime and Manga: Naruto

Rated M for Mature

Genre – Drama / (eventual) Romance

* * *

> General Disclaimer: **Naruto /** **ナル** **ト** belongs to **Kishimoto Masashi** -sensei ( **岸本斉** **史** ).
> 
> This is an **Alternate Universe** / **AU** fanfic.
> 
> **In order to clear up any misunderstandings, _italics_ represents the character’s thoughts and inner character dialogue is italicized with the extra _[ ]_. Lines in **bold** are for emphasis or marks a sectional change.**

Potential triggers warning (incomplete):

  * Forced abortion, mentioned (chapter 1)
  * Gore (chapter 4, 5, 
  * Minor character death (chapter 1, 5, 
  * Miscarriage, mentioned (chapter 2)
  * Misogyny, themes (chapters 1, 2, 5, 
  * Suicide, mentioned (chapter 2, 3, 4,



> Courtesy consumer warning: The author does not condone any of the forms of violence contained in this work, nor does the author intend to influence any consumers of this work to emulate any of the actions done by the characters in this work. **This work is fictional** and should be regarded as such in the events of the plot. Any allusions or references to real people, places, or properties are accidental and unintentional by the author.

* * *

**Chapter 1: Part One, NIGHTFALL**

Haruno Sakura wasn’t a fool.

By all accounts (provided through the private tutors and family members), she was quite smart and had always been an avid reader of the clan’s ancestral records _and_ the clan’s budget logs. Those two sources of reading material were the only two requirements for members of the Haruno clan’s main branch.

And Sakura wasn’t even that.

The Haruno Clan was a civilian clan, but to the world at large, zoomed out of the lens worn by generations of the warring shinobi population, civilians were the wrist. They were the wrist to the hand that was the Uchiha, the Senju, and the rest. And any civilian worth his salt knew of the Haruno.

A millennia before the first shinobi, before the descent of the Rabbit Goddess Kaguya to the mortal realm, it was actually the civilians who were doing the warring, and the Haruno clan, said to be the first worshippers of the now-ancient Gods and Goddesses, had far-reaching members spread across the continent to maintain its position of power.

Bearing the emblem of both Life and Death, the Haruno saw the world for what it was: a carefully balanced thread of fate that weaves and breaks in cycles. Those who were once the oppressed will eventually rise to become the oppressor but not before enduring trials of fire and water. Once mankind has reached its pinnacle, like the careful stretch of wool fibers to spin thread and then into cloth, the Gods and Goddesses—or to the unbelievers who call Them, Nature—would strike down to begin the cycle anew. The answer to all questions, the first Haruno realized, was in the Circle.

That was why the Haruno have always elected to stay in the shadow of those once-great civilian clans.

Once the Tailed Beasts arrived, all civilian life had slowly begun to die out, but it was only through this Great Plague that the earth could then heal and begin anew.

The Haruno never concentrated its members in one general area and even if they did, elected to do so in temples that were hidden deep within the mountains or dotted precariously in shoreline cave systems that bordered trading outposts. The power of the clan always remained consistently in first, the pursuit of knowledge and then, manipulation upon gaining it.

Power before the shinobi race was carefully crafted through espionage, through the trade of secrets between clan heirs, the training of samurai for a life of servitude, and feeding half-truths to the shoguns and absolute lies to the serfs.

 **Power** _**now—** after that first gesture of friendship between Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara spurring the Shinobi Villages into existence_— **lies in the** **daimyōs**.

Civilians lack chakra.

Everyone knows that.

What the Haruno have instead of chakra, however, is the knowledge of it.

On paper, the Haruno Clan is a clan of merchants.

_Is it any wonder, then, that Haruno Sakura was a paper ninja?_

* * *

When Haruno Sakura was born, Haruno Mebuki died.

Mebuki was a kunoichi. She married into the family. She was from Kirigakure, maiden name unknown. Somehow, her clan members are all dead. There was an older sibling, missing or killed.

And that was all Sakura knew of her mother at the age of four.

When Sakura turned five, she found out why no one ever speaks about Mebuki.

Her mother was a kunoichi from Kirigakure. She survived a clan massacre, along with an older sibling who went rogue. She was supposed to kill Haruno Kizashi for a client but fell in love with him instead. Mebuki traveled the world with Haruno Kizashi and after she gave birth to a child, died from blood loss underneath a sakura tree twenty paces outside of the Hidden Village of the Leaves.

Sakura had a foot outside of the rice paper door leading to the terrace when she overheard her nursemaid tell the new gardener that her hair was dyed pink from her mother's blood.

If Mebuki had made that final twenty paces, Sakura would have been ceremoniously killed and buried in an umebaka as a child born out of wedlock.

Instead, Haruno Sakura only had her name withdrawn from the family register and her allotted dowry reabsorbed into the Clan.

When Sakura turned five, she realized that no one ever speaks about Mebuki because no one ever **needs** to speak to her.

On paper, Sakura from the civilian clan of the Haruno does not exist.

* * *

There was one last trick, of course, that helped to preserve the Haruno Clan until today.

They were worshippers of the cycle of Life and Death. Legend has it that in the very beginning, when humanity reached its very first pinnacle, a Higher Being took the physical form of a white dragon and washed the world clean. The Haruno is the only clan now that remembers the First Great Plague, and it was through that piece of knowledge that the Clan weathered through the numerous Great Plagues and remains standing today.

More accurately, the Haruno worshipped a practice that both kept alive the necessary traditions and that keeps the Clan flourishing through adaption to the changing times. After all, the world, itself, ebbs and flows in the Circle.

It was an honor for the main members to wear the Haruno circle—dragon white—on their back as practitioners of honoring the past and heralding in the future.

Wearing the Haruno circle on their back, but then one on each shoulder, only served as a reminder for the branch members that they were originally **outsiders**. They had once been the ones who forgot the White Dragon, who had been the swindled shoguns and the lowly peasants. There were even branch members who had been like Mebuki, completely ignorant of the errors of their ways and felt **contentment** in staying ignorant—ultimately, the greatest sin of mankind, the Haruno believed, was to become a shinobi.

Even the greatest of shinobi clans, it seems, deluded themselves into thinking that they were human.

Shinobi were merely tools.

The Haruno knew this because they, like all civilians, had once utilized them as means of protection, for an assassination, or any other whims of man.

Haruno Sakura, then, _by all accounts_ , seemed very much like a fool in choosing the path of a paper ninja.

_But was she really?_

* * *

**2020.07.03** **Author’s Notes:**

Hi.

This was my first work.

It was **originally** a oneshot, a sixty-page oneshot, **but still**.

A oneshot.

Long story short, I took four years _~~and a mandated quarantine~~_ to _~~put it on the backburner and forget it ever existed because that oneshot had been sixty pages of pure trash on fire~~_ reorganize my thought process about the plot. _~~I actually pulled a Kakashi and got lost on the road of life but that’s a longer story so nevermind.~~_

Anyways.

I know the title page up there looks all formal and scary, but I also know how twisted my mind gets. A few scenes might trigger a few people. Read at your own risk. And of course, _~~because I’m not a **completely** shitty human being,~~_ I will give reminders at the beginning of the chapters if a scene will pop up that is 100% triggering.

(Also, heads-up: I have no long-term game plan, **_but I’m also not a quitter_** , so expect varied waiting times in between chapter updates.)


	2. Eventide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the writing seems to be running all over the place, then yeah.  
> She’s seven.  
> All seven-year-olds daydream during a history lesson, I can promise you that.

"Sakura," her cousin whispered over the low tea table, "what are you drawing?"

Sakura made sure to raise her brush pen in a gesture of acknowledgement before carefully responding, "A tiger, cousin Mitsuki-san."

She dared not to turn her head and look her cousin in the eye. There were already many rules broken today, starting from the simple addressment of her name to the two of them speaking at all.

"Ah, you're so weird."

Sakura still didn't look, but she could hear the smile in her cousin's voice. And just as Sakura knew her cousin was smiling, she also knew that the rest of the Haruno children, twenty in total, sitting in columns of five and rows of four, could hear the two outcasts in the back.

Mitsuki-san had always been oblivious, but Sakura was not.

At the front of the room, a Haruno elder sat seiza-style before them, and in his hands, he held a spanned-out folding fan to rest before his chest.

Sakura recognized the drunken samurai drawn over it when she first walked into the room this afternoon— _last, always last_ —and knew it to be the work of a famous artist from the Land of Tea. She also remembers a crude rendition of the same brush art, all choppy lines and ink blots, from an old, faded scroll that Kizashi sent her last spring.

The real piece, now up so close in front of her, in the span of seconds that Sakura allowed herself to look at it, have been permanently seared into the lid of her eyes.

She could patiently marvel at it every time she blinked.

She also tried her best to keep her brush strokes at the perfect balance of light and thick on the cheap parchment paper she swiped from the kitchens before every lesson.

And Sakura knew for a fact that she was disliked by the Clan. Here, even without anyone saying anything to her, she could feel it in the rigid way they turned their backs to her before class. They were all children, but even children knew which classmate was the better-off classmate to befriend.

She sat in the very back row of the room, on a tea table that she had to constantly hold up with her left hand because one of the legs were chipped. _It was probably Haruno Daisuke during another one of his drunken rampages again_ , in the sequestered side room to the elder's house.

There were other outcasts like her, of course— _yes, there was_ —but none were as bold as her.

"Sakura—"

Except, _of course_ —

"Cousin Mitsuki-san," Sakura was really now doing her best to keep her tone as light as her brush, "you're a part of the main branch. Stay **focused**."

For the next twenty minutes— _a blissfully **silent** twenty minutes—_Sakura filled in the irises of her tiger's eyes and stripes, glaring at her through the portrait and echoing in its monotone colors to the surrounding shrubbery of the scene. She drew the bark of the trees a little too thickly, but as her picture progressed, she grew to like the increasingly accurate portrayal of the mountains, having them remain consistent to the images in her head when she glossed over the scroll.

While the artistry was lacking, the Tea native who penned the scroll had been a compelling writer.

Sakura stayed up many nights within her dreams, tentatively brushing her fingers among the weeds that grew from the marshy rice paddies carved into the mountainside. Dark outlines of distant trees dotted the arched tops and in a sweeping pattern of both shade and space, the painted sides of the mountain were in a green so dark that it looked like black.

Then she'll blink her eyes and arrive at the other side.

Snaking rows of iridescent green tea plantations sprawled all over her path as she made her way down the mountain, so deep down that she was afraid of tripping and tumbling through the waist-high hedges the entire way.

The air was thick and dry at the same time, a gathering of moisture at the back of her throat every time she breathed out, but with every inhale, a bitter sharpness burned in her lungs. And when she opened her eyes in the morning, she'll smell it again in the little clay cup her nursemaid brings her ever since she stopped taking her afternoon naps.

Sakura was six years old when a servant brought her that scroll from Kizashi. And tied to it in thin cords of black and silver, a formal decree from the head of the branch house that comes to every six-year-old branch Haruno on their release from the Clan's Nursery.

Unlike every six-year-old Haruno, however, Sakura had no parents waiting by the Nursery doors for her, so she started drinking a cup of tea every morning and with it, a letter to the Clan's head of the Servant House until she received a reply back.

Little Haruno Sakura never had a House to go home to on the weekends, as her father had always been too busy to visit, and growing up in the Nursery without a mother, Sakura grew closer to the servants themselves than she would ever be to anyone else. Signing Kizashi's name at the bottom, Sakura also made sure to include that the nursemaid and all those currently employed within the Nursery will continue their monthly withdraws from his inheritance.

 _Of course_ , they were none the wiser that Sakura kept all of Kizashi's letters in the folds of an old tattered kimono that kept her warm during infancy, hidden at the very back of her Nursery closet and underneath its peeling tatami mat.

She had traced those frenzied brushstrokes with her wrist every night, imagining him writing the letters on the back of a fur trader's bumpy wagon ride or standing up, using his palm as a just-as-wobbly tea desk, waiting on the wet docks at sunrise for the next boat to another distant shoreline.

"Sakura."

This time, Sakura set down her brush completely.

She rested it on a small cylindrical block of firewood she took to carving the day she first noticed that all the other students gathered in the elder's house had porcelain brush rests.

"Akisada-sama."

The elder stood before her imposingly, but Sakura kept her eyes on his white-clad feet. The tabi had split seams along the side that reminded her of Akisada-sama's wife.

She felt the elder lean down over her, looking over her artwork. But Sakura, in the heady way of a spoiled seven-year-old heiress that she _knew_ _she **wasn't** and wouldn't **ever** be_, knew her work to be perfect.

"Haruno Sakura," Akisada-sama's voice was firm, but Sakura was unwavering, "what will the ancestors think when they see their descendant's blatant show of disrespect by ignoring the honored tradition of storytelling?"

Sakura made sure to wait a few seconds. The classroom was now empty, but she was still unsure that the other children's House servants had left the halls.

"Akisada-sama." Raising her head the tiniest bit, Sakura kept eye-level with the wooden handle of the elder's fan and on its polish, gleaming in the light a golden brown. "The ancestors will know that, just as I have chosen to respect my current elders, I have always respected them by holding _great_ reverence for their stories."

"By not paying attention in class and drawing tigers?"

Raising her head completely at this, Sakura finally stared into the teasing grey eyes of her elder.

"Art tells stories, and just like the stories of our ancestors that you've told me, Akisada-sama, I'm now telling theirs, too."

* * *

When Haruno Akisada first chose to ignore classroom misbehavior to lessen the interruption of his classes, he did so out of sympathy. They were all extremely young children being forced to listen to an age-old story and then to nitpick, for themselves, the hidden meanings of why he's telling them.

He was also reeling from the loss of his younger wife who chose to hang herself after inescapable grief from a miscarriage.

The Akisada of then had been drastically different from the Akisada of now.

Hanami had been the sole daughter of a cloth merchant, and when they got married, his main branch brothers were overjoyed in their half-blood brother's good luck of merging two profitable businesses into one.

When Hanami lost her first child, Akisada's sisters-in-law constantly visited her.

Akisada, who had been immersed in the woodworking business of his father had been heavily behind on the commissions. Despite being a son of his father's mistress, Akisada at an early age displayed proficiency in wood art and acquired many customers across the nations.

His talent resulted in him inheriting his father's business over the rest of his half-brothers who turned to other trades.

It was only after Hanami's death had Akisada finally woken up to the truth of what the branches of the Haruno Clan had become, of how they had allowed their members to twist the lives of the innocent until mutual destruction became the only fruits of their labor. There had never been a Haruno who's main occupation was farming, but the Clan now, before Akisada's very eyes, seemed to be cultivating a host of parasitic practices.

Akisada's sisters-in-law always brought their children to visit Hanami. When she stepped off of that footstool, she was unknowingly two months pregnant.

Buried among the twine bound books and the yellowing scrolls that Hanami had once loved to collect, Akisada found solace in the idea of one day reminding the Haruno that the ancestors had never intended to divide the cave travelers from the seamen. Nor had they cemented their descendants to a fate ruled at birth by their parents, inescapable even in the acquirement of knowledge.

What difference is there from one silver-tongued serpent to another?

When Haruno Akisada first heard of the Haruno who was not a Haruno, the Clan Patriarch had officially approved of his proposal.

Akisada had been readying his House to be opened to the rest of the Clan as an Academy of sorts that allowed both main and side branch children to learn about their ancestors before starting school in their parents' respective homelands.

He had not yet started teaching his third batch of students when Akisada started to notice a pink haired child listening intently through a slit in the rice paper. By the fifth and sixth time she came, Akisada grabbed an old tea desk from the kitchens and asked her to come in.

None of his other students had arrived yet, because she was always early, and besides. What harm was there if she stayed in the very back row?

At her tender age of three, he marveled at the toddler, who had barely mastered walking, to sit still for hours on end and understand his drawn-out lessons and nod or shake her head at his questions to her upperclassmen. There seemed to be little difference in her engagement during the main or the branch members classes, and he only knew because she stayed behind long enough to attend both batches during his day.

On many occasions, during his two-hour breaks at noon, he'd even personally witnessed Haruno Sakura skillfully evade her nursemaid during naptime to only then clumsily stumble into his library. After getting over his initial shock, it became little wonder to him when, peering into the fifth row of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, he'll find her avidly consuming an opened scroll on the floor.

In the morning, when troops of servants swamped into his House, serving their main branch lords and ladies, Akisada would start 'accidentally' misplacing a few of the higher level books to the bottom shelves. Haruno Sakura had just turned four, and he was extremely grateful that, as one of the few constant visitors he had to his library, she does not drool or put inedible things in her mouth like her classmates did.

When Sakura turned five, however, he found her poring over the Clan records and knew from that moment on that she has awoken.

How could he, then, divide a clan outcast from another?

* * *

The sunset painted beautiful shapes across the floor.

Sakura couldn't help but peer even closer at them as she nodded along to the story.

"Akisada-sama," and after ignoring his sigh, "why is a sunset so colorful, but its casted shadows completely colorless?"

When Akisada-sama stayed silent for a beat too long, Sakura looked up at him.

"I think the samurai was just a drunkard," and then, sniffing derisively, she carefully laid out the fan on the rickety tea table between them, "Look at him, Akisada-sama."

Out on the table, the samurai was drawn with three drugs of wine hefting from his belt instead of a sword.

"Now, look at the tiger!"

Pausing, Sakura reexamined her tiger with Akisada-sama again. She really was a **very** good artist— _if they did say so themselves_. And judging by the amused expression Akisada-sama currently aimed at her drawing, Sakura grew even _surer_ that this piece was possibly even **better** than the original.

"Now, Akisada-sama," and with Sakura aiming a look pointedly at him, she patted the silver of space between her tiger and the fan, "explain to me again how he managed to grab its neck and split its skull open with his fists."

When Akisada-sama burst into laughter, Sakura started pouting.

"Akisada-sama! Please take this seriously!"

Standing up suddenly, Sakura rushed over to the open paper door and pointed up into the sky. The oranges and pinks lit her skin and hair into a mixture of fire, but hurriedly, Sakura lifted her other hand to point at her shadow.

"Look at the colors, Akisada-sama, and now look at the ground! Like the samurai, what is a perception of the sunset is completely different from the perspective gained from its shadows."

As Akisada-sama finally started to calm, he bemusedly unwrapped his hands from his haori sleeves and reached for a cup of the now-cold tea. When the shadows grew longer and then into the darkness of night, Haruno Akisada sat there with his young charge, and this time, listened to **her** retelling of the hero's journey.

* * *

"Thus, when the samurai re-entered town, he was heralded by the townspeople as the slayer of a maneater. With the tiger dead, and the villagers relaxed, news finally reached the samurai's ears that his brother was killed. The murderer had been his brother's own wife, and in a fit of rage, the samurai killed her and her lover. What then, students, would this scenario be seen as by our ancestors?"

"Sakura!"

Sighing in annoyance, said recipient of her poorly whispered name brought both hands back out from underneath the tea desk to set her scroll onto the table.

"Yesterday, you were drawing tigers. Today, you're reading a scroll during class. I heard from Auntie Koishi that you were scolded for hours by Akisada-sensei! Just how long of a scolding are you itching for today?"

When Sakura boldly looked up at the front of the room this time, she knew that the rest of her classmates were too enraptured in the story to pay any attention to the two clan misfits in the back.

"Cousin Mitsuki-san," Sakura said while stubbornly aiming her gaze at the front of the room, "my picture has found a new owner. If you were any wiser, you'll do the same with your attention span."

When lessons ended that day, Sakura congratulated herself on making her favorite cousin smile for two days in a row before making her way to Akisada-sama's library.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story about the samurai is actually taken from the Chinese novel series: "Outlaws of the Marsh" (水浒传). Wu Song and his brother, Wu Da Lang, are two of the 108 total main characters within the series. In his story, Wu Song was a soldier instead of a samurai, and after his retirement from the battlefield, received a local government position for his province after defeating the man-eating tiger with his bare hands. (The wine he drank was a traditional Chinese rice wine, which usually has an alcohol content of 18-25% ABV, so maaaaaybe he really did kill the tiger after drinking those three jugs…)
> 
> Haruno Daisuke, another OC of mine (along with Haruno Mitsuki—who I am purposefully keeping ambiguous), will reappear again, so keep him in mind. His name (Daisuke) is written in Japanese as 大典, which means “big, law/rule/ceremony”. Haruno Akisada has his name written as 顕定, meaning “manifest, firm”.
> 
> I remember learning my Chinese brush calligraphy by tracing the characters’ stroke order with my wrist growing up. (Of course, not all Asian Tiger Mothers™ allowed their daughters to cheat like that.) Japanese characters also have a stroke order that numbers which stroke—or line, dot, dash, etc.—must go first/before another. Every character has their own ‘unique’ stroke order, but once we learn the basics, we can predict which stroke should go first.
> 
> Tabi (足袋) socks are basically Japanese toe socks that separate the big toe from the rest of the toes, so they’ll fit in the straps of the shoe—which are wooden zōri (草履) in this case.
> 
> For those who are careful readers, yes—Inner Sakura IS making itself known in little moments during this chapter. More on that devious entity in the next few chapters!


	3. Eventide ii

“Sakura!”

Sakura was getting tired of hearing her name being shouted across the compound. Without turning around, she continued down the stone steps leading to the back gardens of Akisada-sama’s residence. She never got explicit permission for her current mission, but Sakura knew that without the tiniest hint of Akisada’s allowance for her presence in his back gardens, she wouldn’t even be making this journey at all.

“Sakura, wait!”

For once, Sakura was glad that Mitsuki didn’t give in to the usual antics of actually starting to run after her. But the further she walked, the smaller the stones on the garden path got, and the deeper she was sinking into the feeling of quicksand that dragged her mind further into its dazed state. Mitsuki picked this up when the trees started growing larger and larger, and with a final shout in her direction, Sakura finally turned to look behind her.

“Stay right there, cousin Mitsuki-san.” Her steps weren’t slowing down as she spoke. Sakura only took a single glance at Mitsuki, but those pearly white eyes were seared into her mind. In the morning sunlight, those eyes glowed and Sakura could make out her cousin’s desperation written all over them.

 _What a silly cousin of ours_ —the voice in her head crooned. But Sakura had no time to acknowledge it. In the brief flashes of her mind’s eye, she was still staring at her cousin and the warm summer breeze that sent those black tresses flying as the child obediently listened to her and stopped going after her.

Sakura pushed down the sudden urge to paint her cousin’s hair, spilled over the traditional main branch garb worn this deceptively bright morning— _blood red, right? It was blood red, blood_ —

“Stop it.”

Sakura didn’t stop walking, but she found her feet slowly starting to fumble, the arch of each foot now having to stretch a little bit further every time with every step she took as the creases between the grey stone slabs grew more and more to reveal the weeds pushing through them.

If this was any normal walk into the woods, Sakura would’ve sighed at the shade of trees splashing across her, shielding her from the piercing morning sun, as it was so piercing when her cousin was trailing after her earlier that she felt the top of her scalp grow warm.

 _—It giggled_.

A headache was slowly starting to pulse through her temples, but Sakura pushed through. Up ahead, she was finally starting to see the archway.

It was a curious structure, all tree roots and green vines. The brown mixed evenly with the vegetation that grappled it, but the roots stood alone from the impasse of cedar trees that seemed to be forming a wall around her and blocked her from peering over to the other side.

This was the end of Akisada’s garden, and Sakura was about to barrel through the archway until—

_So, it didn’t lie, after all?_

“Shut up.”

Sakura stopped walking, eyes staring at the roots, twisted and gnarly from vines that seemed, in more than a few places, to pierce **through** the roots. She hadn’t noticed that before, but to be fair, the last time she saw it, she had only been focused on getting her way through it.

“Stop calling her an ‘it’.”

Sakura wanted to walk closer to the archway but couldn’t get her feet to move. This wasn’t like before, where everything seemed to flow seamlessly to the next. No, this time, Sakura was rightfully hesitant. The vines looped in a few places around the roots that made it seem like they were choking the roots.

Sakura wondered if what she was doing was another form of suicide. After all, those roots, even if Sakura couldn’t see it, must have belonged to one of the trees around her.

_Like how you call me?_

“Stop it!” Sakura hissed, but her headache was fading away. This time, she did breathe out a sigh, and she was allowed to have her body click out of the autopilot that Sakura had been placidly watching her body go through.

Immediately, she started looking around.

The trees were tall, and their trunks were wide enough that Sakura’s arms couldn’t wrap around them if she tried. That wasn’t what caught her eye, however, as she began to notice that areas of the bark a few hands above her head were eerily smooth. Stalking closer to the cedar tree closest to her, Sakura noticed that in between the streaks of tawny brown and umber cascading down the trunk, there were miniscule fissures in the wood.

No ants were crawling out of them, but to Sakura’s knowledge, she remembered that cedar trees didn’t leak sap.

Still.

The bark itself seemed to have been sanded away, and Sakura was sure that if the awning of the tree’s branches hadn’t been blocking the sun right now, she could’ve see her reflection showing through a few spots in the streaks of umber trailing down the trunk.

A cursory glance to the trees beside this one showed the same result. Raising her head even higher, she noticed that even the lowest branches were towering over her. They were taller than the Fire Palace entrance she’d seen artist depictions of, comparing the short but bulky figures of the imperial samurai to the imposing rectangular doorway, hidden in Akisada-sama’s study one night as she tried to escape his imposed “bedtime” for her.

**. . .**

**. .**

**.**

That night had also been the very first night she finally gathered her courage to speak to Akisada-sama’s little sister that she’d always gotten passing glances of in the halls. Sakura had, on more than one occasion, seen her silently weeping while sitting on the other side of the rice paper door. That was a spot that Sakura herself sat in at the very beginning, when she was trying to listen in on a class taught by the first clan sensei Sakura heard accepted both the main and branch family members as students.

Back then, Sakura had recognized an opportunity when she saw it, and it wasn’t until a few days of hiding in closets and behind comfortably-designed roof ledges that Sakura found out where the sensei was teaching.

It had been the very first Haruno House that Sakura went into, and unfortunately—or _rather fortunately_ —Akisada-sama’s little sister was the first non-servant Haruno that Sakura had met. Sakura was unsure of how to react at the sad smile that she gave her the first time they met and ultimately, started panicking when she saw the trembling hand that was reaching out for her from the older girl.

In a dark corner around the hallway that Sakura was hiding in, she spotted the drops of tears that spattered on the floor. They were the only notice that Sakura got as she had immediately bowed her head when she saw the outstretched hand.

Sakura didn’t know whether the girl was from the main or branch family, so she reverted to the demure posture that the servants taught her and had been, since then, so innately ingrained into her default nature.

In the next terse seconds that Sakura waited for the hand to descend on her head, or shoulder, or anywhere else on her body for that matter, she closed her eyes.

 ** _And of course,_** that’s when **It** appeared.

In her mind’s eye, she stared into an empty mirror. On the other side, though, she was sure that someone was there.

**_Who are you?_ **

A giggle.

The mirror rippled, and Sakura was back to staring at the darkness underneath her eyelids. At that point, the only thing Sakura was sure of was that nothing had touched her, as she **knew** that if anyone had, she would have immediately felt it.

It could possibly be warm.

But she wasn’t sure.

Nothing touched her then, so Sakura looked up.

Before her eyes, there was only an empty hallway, so Sakura presumed the worst and walked out of the House.

.

Everything had gone silent in her mind, then, until—

_You’re a smart child._

_But can’t you tell we aren’t wanted here_?

.

It’s been weeks. But unlike the cold she got that one time when Sakura stepped over the bridge and into the koi pond behind the Nursery, Sakura didn’t feel like she could get over this by herself.

**_Just who the hell are you?!_ **

The giggling sounded insane, and it was grating on her nerves the longer it went on. First starting up at certain parts of the day, Sakura thought she was losing her mind.

The voice was sharp and cracked in a few places as it got into the higher octaves.

At a certain point, Sakura thought that this was some sort of mind reverberation, a trick of her memory like the dreams she had at night that revisited the events of her day, and she thought that this was probably some sort of divine punishment for the times she snuck into the servants’ quarters within the Nursery to listen in on them during those long, late evenings, gossiping about their masters over cups of jasmine tea.

Sakura’s nursemaid had been the one personally responsible for sneaking in that battered and rusting record player, supposedly from a merchant of the Land of Sound on a Sunday. The records that came with it were overly cheery in Sakura’s opinion and scratched something awful during the second and third songs on the ‘B’ side.

Still, Sakura recognized her nursemaid humming them when she snuck into the kitchen sometimes, watching her work over the granite countertop from an unlit corner in the wall.

When Sakura was four, she found patches of the ceiling loosened from a storm and took to traversing above the rooms to escape her nursemaid. At times, Sakura seeks her out through this method, too.

This was also how she found her best hiding spots, atop the roof and situated in specific tiles that Sakura fashioned for herself to shield from the nightly wind. Situated now, directly in a teepee nook created by the upper roof and the jutting outer roof layers of her room within the Nursery, Sakura tried to ease all of the tightly wound muscles in her body. Closing her eyes, she cleared her mind of all thoughts and focused intently on her breathing.

This, Sakura found out one day while drifting in and out of sleep, is the sort of meditation that could force **It** out.

 ** _This has gone on long enough._** Sakura tried to be stern with It, truly, she did. **_But that incessant giggling!_**

— _Is it only the giggling that’s bothering you?_

She was standing before the mirror again. Staring intently into the glass, Sakura tried to will the reflection to stop rippling.

But that was the problem.

Sakura wasn’t **seeing** a reflection at all.

After another week of the same process repeating over and over again, Sakura had finally had enough.

 _Hey!_ —

**_No, you’ve had your chance._ **

— _Now, just wait a minute, you damn brat!_

 ** _Shut_** —

Sakura threw her fist into the glass, but instead of shattering, Sakura felt her torso follow the weight of her arm.

— ** _up!_**

And she fell into the mirror.

* * *

The sour smell of peeled oranges pierced Sakura’s nose.

Before she blinked her eyes open, Sakura could imagine the spray of tiny citrus drops bursting forth from the rind as she peeled them.

_You’re awake._

Sakura looked and met dark eyes that eerily reflected her own eyes back at her. Sakura could see the widening disbelief in her green irises in the reflection. But the man’s expression wasn’t the same.

 ** _And she could only see a reflection in them, just like that night in Akisada-sama's study_** —

Quickly tampering **_wherever that was going_** back down, Sakura spread out her other senses, cautiously checking her surroundings from the corner of her eyes. Underneath her spread out palms, she felt the oddly **warm** tatami mat underneath them. But aside from her instinctive suspicion that rose with the old man slowly getting up to stand in front of her, Sakura couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary in the plain, sparsely kept room. She refused to break eye contact with the elder in front of her, however, and waited patiently for him as he slowly made his way towards her.

The screen doors were the color of paper left out in the sun for too long. No servants must have been in this house to change the rice paper, but in areas where Sakura spotted sewn-on patches of a thicker rice cloth, Sakura guessed that the man in front of her— _and whoever was here with them_ —kept the place well-cleaned by himself.

Sakura stopped in her cursory inspection when she replayed the words again.

**_Who else is here with us?_ **

_Here._

The old man had both hands raised and, in his palms, laid a half-peeled orange.

Sakura stared at it.

The last thing she remembered was spying a flickering shadow in the upper branches of the cedar tree, and the next thing she knew, she was now staring at an orange.

Completely dazed but trying her best to take stock of the situation, Sakura took it from the old man’s gray palms, and when her fingers brushed them, Sakura could’ve **sworn** that **they both** **shivered**.

_Hey, shadows don’t flicker._

_Are you listening to me, you brat?_

Sakura took an orange wedge into her mouth and watched as the elder sat down in front of her.

His legs crossed themselves into a position reminiscent of the old samurai drawings Sakura tacked into the wall of her closet, but all that was missing was a sword sticking up from the ground in between the v-space of his propped up knee and folded leg. His clothes were clean, so clean that Sakura suspected it was new.

White fabric gets dirty easily, after all.

Sakura would know after being dressed in it throughout infancy, as proven by the little old, tattered thing she had hiding in her closet.

But speaking of white, the old man’s hair was silver— _not white?_

 **_No, not white_ ** _._

_Curious. Curious, indeed._

“Where am I?”

The old man was silent, still staring intently at her. Sakura wasn’t one to get easily unnerved by intense stares, as she could tell the elder wasn’t doing so out of suspicion or malice— _like the rest._

But as Sakura continued to stare at him, she slowly relaxed.

The edges of the man’s mouth were peeking into a small regretful smile, and Sakura felt a riotous mixture of emotions pour over her.

Suddenly on the verge of tears, Sakura wet the roof of her mouth before whispering tentatively.

“Who are you?”

. .

.

On the other side of the mirror, Sakura fell directly into the path of a girl. And if it wasn’t for the whisper of space between her fingertips to the girl’s feet, Sakura was pretty sure that she narrowly avoiding conking her forehead against the girl’s shins.

Bent over on the ground, Sakura waited for her knees to blossom in pain, gritting her teeth in instinctual preparation, but when she felt nothing as she slowly opened her eyes, she realized that the ground beneath them **wasn’t** wet from her blood.

_I told you to wait!_

It was wet with blood already.

_Humans are so impatient nowadays!_

Sakura noticed that her hair had become undone, pooling over the back of head at the force of her throwing herself into the mirror.

The ends of her hair sunk into the ground under her palms slightly, the tips of her already pink hair turning a dark maroon.

A scream was lodged in the back of her throat, and looking back on it, Sakura was pretty sure that she was going into shock then.

Slowly lifting her head up, Sakura trailed up the pristinely white kimono of the girl standing before her.

 **It** was a child.

And the child looked exactly like her.

.

**_What are you?_ **

_Ah! We’re finally asking the right questions._

_._

When Sakura turned five and became braver after an entire year of mimicking her classmates’ posture and avoiding Akisada-sama’s eyes, she finally gathered the courage to talk to her.

Akisada-sama’s little sister, that is.

Stumbling across her sleeping on the futon half-pulled out from the closet of Akisada-sama’s study was an accident. Sakura could swear that on her life.

Choosing to sit in the corner of his desk and the paper door leading to his back gardens instead of walking out of the study entirely, however, would be a promise that Sakura felt too hard to make. After all, it was Akisada-sama, himself, who liked to remind his students that hard-pressed lies were the most inefficient lies as they were usually made up on the spot.

The best lies were ones carefully planned and took weeks of weaseling her way throughout the compound.

And of course, after years of traversing the pockets of insulation between the structural supports in her Nursery’s ceiling, Sakura did just that after hacking out a few placement pieces in Akisada-sama’s roof.

Turns out, Akisada-sama’s ceiling was in quite the disrepair as Sakura had a few close calls that almost sent her tumbling onto Akisada-sama head, along with a few unsuspecting servants, a classmate here or there, and even his little sister, on occasion. And **there was that one time** when debris from the ceiling fell into Mitsuki's bento when Sakura's cousin had been distracted, but **_of course_** , that had nothing to do with the cousin in question almost revealing her hiding spot when Sakura was only trying to play a game (albeit, a **_one-side_** game) of hide-and-seek with h—

**_But that’s beside the point._ **

_The point is, now, you’re finally going to talk to Akisada-sama’s little sister!_

**_Yes, but after she wakes up_**.

Eyeing the sleeping woman carefully, Sakura picked up a stray scroll stacked by the foot of Akisada-sama’s desk and started reading.

There wasn’t a seal on it, nor a Haruno crest, so Sakura figured that it was probably another scroll about some faraway land’s history or mythical character or—

It was a painting.

And the painting was Akisada-sama’s little sister.

Sakura glanced up and saw the girl was sitting up now, and on the white fabric of the half-unfurled futon, Sakura saw blood seeping outwards into an increasingly widening dark patch on the cloth.

The voice in her mind was oddly silent for once, but Sakura suspected that as her breath was coming out in harsher and harsher pants from her mouth, that her entire body was going into shock.

**_Again._**

That, or she was dying.

_Again?_

_**Again.**_

Either way, Sakura could see clearly now that the girl was not Akisada-sama’s little sister. No, on the bottom of the scroll, she remembers rather **_distinctly_** that the inscription read ‘Haruno Hanami’.

.

_What do you think I am?_

**_Me._ **

_._

_. ._

“Who are you?”

The old man’s smile slowly began to fall when Sakura repeated the question.

She continued to stare at him intently, however, peering deep into his eyes so oddly reflecting her own in his blank irises, she wondered why his expression grew more and more regretful the longer she stared at him.

Behind her, she suddenly realized that there was someone standing at the paper door.

 _Hey, brat_ —

Sakura wasn't in the mood to respond, as she was trying to get her still-groggy brain to calculate the window of time she had to make her way to the other side of the room. If behind her was the door leading into the hallway, judging by the person standing behind it and **_about to come in_** , then by following the room’s traditional design, the wall to the left of her should be a door leading to a closet, so that means the only other exit would be—

— _I don’t sense any danger. Don’t go creating some for yourself!_

Sakura bolted for the door behind the old man, but when she opened it, there was only snow.

* * *

_Well, this is a surprise._

Sakura almost verbally snarled at the voice in her head if she wasn't still in shock.

_It’s not every day you see a ghost. I wonder if they’re actually vengeful?_

Gaping at the girl before them, Sakura was trying to turn the bolts of her mind into reconciling with the scroll and the painted picture of the girl before her.

Sakura only remembered that a few gossiping servants one night had spilled that Akisada-sama’s wife died during childbirth, and staring at the growing pool of blood spreading across the tatami mat— ** _it’s not real, it’s not, it’s_** _—_ the apparition before her matches their report.

_Then why did the scroll list the cause of death as suicide?_

Closing her eyes suddenly—

_Hey! Are you trying to get yourself killed out there?! We still don't know if she's vengeful!_

—Sakura re-furled the scroll and set it down.

“Hanami-sama.”

Bowing lowly, Sakura practically mushed her nose into the floor if not having the need to breathe in order to get her words out.

_Get up, you stupid brat!_

“I sincerely apologize for disturbing you.”

_What are you doing?!?_

_. ._

_._

_Hey! What are you doing?_

Sakura figured that since this was her mind, or at least some obscure, well-hidden, barely-sealed off part of it, she could damn well get off the floor if she so pleased.

**_You, why is there blood on the floor?_ **

Turning her nose at the scowling expression of the girl before her— ** _of it, of IT, because it is NOT her_** —Sakura made her way around the fuming thing blocking her path.

As she made her way deeper into the mirror, Sakura felt the blood lapping at her ankles until eventually, she was wading through it, knee-deep.

 _ **How infuriating**_ , the thing was following after her, ranting all the way about propriety and respect and— _I’m an ancient goddess, you know that? How the HELL are you just going around and shuffling through MY things?!?_

At this, Sakura turned around. A crest of blood splashed around her, but Sakura could see that her counterpart’s kimono was still clean.

**_Your things?_ **

_Yes! MY things!_

Looking around the mindscape, Sakura could see nothing but blood behind the way they came and to her right and left, an infinite stretch of pitch black sky greeted her.

**_No moon, no stars._ **

**_What things do you speak of possessing,_ **

**_if not for my mind housing your existence?_ **

Staring straight into those mint green eyes the thing lifted off of her own features, Sakura could tell that her words— ** _thoughts?_** —struck a nerve with the being sharing her body.

_I’m not here by will, you know._

It had been a few minutes since the being last spoke, but since Sakura could feel It still trailing behind her— _ **and this time, doing so much more quietly**_ —she let It be.

Until It broke the silence, that is, in a tone of voice so uncharacteristic of the last five minutes or five years that she’s been here that Sakura couldn’t stop herself from asking,

**_What do you mean?_ **

Sakura didn’t turn around though, as she was adamant on seeing how far this mindscape could go.

 _When you die, I will be freed_.

A shiver went down Sakura’s spine, but just as she knew her way around the stricter servants in the Nursery, she kept her voice soft and low but kept plowing her way forward.

**_Do you want to kill me?_ **

.

. .

“Do you want to kill me, Hanami-sama?”

Without raising her head, Sakura waited.

Inside of her however, she could hear her Inner Self scream out expletives. If Sakura hasn’t already heard them all before, she would’ve shuddered at both the language used and the volume of it being shouted across her eardrums.

But Sakura suddenly felt the urge to cry.

A pair of daintily pale feet slowly made their way across the tatami and as it got closer, Sakura knew that Haruno Hanami wasn’t going to hurt her.

No blood painted the bottom of her soles.

**.**

**. .**

**. . .**

As Sakura stared at the snow-laden landscape, she had an urge to cry.

At the same time, however, she also wanted to laugh.

_So, it’s the same thing again, this time, huh?_

Turning around, Sakura stared at the old man and understood why she felt such a strong wave of regret earlier.

 ** _And bitterness, and peace, and self-pity, and happiness, and thinly veiled hatred_** —Sakura would bet money that the person standing on the other side of the door was the old man’s son.

* * *

_Why would I do that?_

Sakura withheld her the instinctive urge to close her eyes. All around her, the knee-high blood rescinded, and she watched the sky lighten into streaks of gold bursting through a green canopy of leaves and towering branches. The tree trunks were wider than the two of her outstretched arms, and when she turned around, she saw a flowering cherry tree.

_Go to Haruno Akisada’s library and look for the Clan records._

Sakura didn’t pay any mind to the voice as she made her way to the tree. Overhead, she saw an archway of roots and vines.

_You’ve always been a smart child, Haruno Sakura._

Spotting a pale hand peaking out from behind the tree trunk, something was keeping itself from spilling out of her mouth, latching onto Sakura’s tongue like a lifeline. She made her way closer and closer to the archway, intent on seeing who that hand belonged to, sitting on the other side of the cherry tree.

**_So, you won’t kill me?_ **

Sakura held her breath when she crossed over, past the archway and into the other side.

.

 _No, Sakura_.

She couldn’t hear Hanami say it, but she could feel her intent, and ultimately, that was what calmed Sakura down.

_A mother would never be able to kill a child._

_._

And just like that time Sakura felt Haruno Hanami touch her, she cried.

And just like that time Sakura woke up from her dream of wading through a sea of blood, still sitting on a roof ledge over her Nursery room, she felt Haruno Mebuki touch her under a flowering sakura tree.

_You’ve always been a smart child, Haruno Sakura._

_Go see for yourself what lies beyond the Clan walls._

And determinedly, Sakura made her way to the back gardens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, Hwasa’s “Maria” is on loop for me right now, and if it wasn’t for my goldfish-level attention span, I would’ve been holding a one-(wo)man dance party instead of satisfying my urges for BAMF Haruno Sakura. Go stan a controversial queen. (And how’s that age-old saying go again? “If you can’t read your favorite fanfic, then go write it”? Yeah, that’s me instead of finishing my summer courses homework right now. I’ve really got no shame.)
> 
> THE AUTHOR: (in a tone of voice as one would have after pulling two straight all-nighters in a row) “I have unleashed enough hints about who the old man is. Please do not spoil the character unveiling even further through the comments section below, thank you.”


	4. Eventide iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Japanese honorific, -dono (or tono, 殿 “-との”), is roughly translated as “lord” or “master”. The difference between this honorific and the more common-place honorific, -sama, is that the speaker does not make him-/herself appear as one of lower status than the person being addressed with -dono.

Sakura doesn’t remember exactly how she felt that day.

The sky was blue, the maid came to wake her up on-time, and when breakfast was served, she ate it quietly in front of the servants while she bickered with the entity in her head. She hadn’t known exactly what It was yet, but by then, she’d be hard-pressed to find the entity wholly unneeded…

Inner Sakura, as Sakura had taken to naming It—ignoring Its shouts of _disrespect! What disrespect! You should call me Sakura-sama like the rest of your—_ kept her entertained on the most lifeless of days, when Akisada-sama was reviewing the lessons of maintaining a household ( ** _what needs do I have that must be satisfied by marriage?_** Sakura remember scoffing, tuning out Inner’s giggling in her head), or when cousin Mitsuki was in one of those **_un-tease-able_ **moods again ( _cut the kid some slack, you brat. Your Mitsuki’s already a cheery one with_ those _circumstances; I’d say you should let h—)._

Either way, Sakura soon found that the two of them became the most peaceful sharing a mindscape when they read through the scrolls she stole— _borrow, kid!—_ or **_borrowed_** from Akisada-sama’s personal library. The materials he kept there always smelled of tanned leather and broken inkstones. Whenever they came across a passage from the far west or a ship-master’s log from a journey to the southern seas, Inner was ready to launch into Its own long, winding stories of kinships, betrayals, and godhood.

Sakura doesn’t quite get it, but there was something that twinged in the depths of her soul as she listened to Inner describe the harshest of laws from Heaven and the ashen taste of the air in Hell. Every night in her dreams, Sakura entered the mirror in her head to hear the ending to those stories, stepping into the ever-expanding landscape of black sky and red rivers (it was only until her third or fourth visit that Inner reminded Sakura that the landscape could change to their whims, so they soon spent their nights together lying on dark fur skins by a raging bonfire and from then on, every night, Sakura stared at the flames licking shadows within her mirror image’s eyes).

Time moved differently when she was with Inner. But whenever she stepped out of it, out of the realms Inner shaped and molded to match her stories, out of the mirror in her mind, there would always be morning.

But that day, morning came in a way that Sakura regretted for the rest of her life.

* * *

The half-peeled orange lied between them.

“Haruno-dono, I apologize for the methods I took to bring you here.”

With her back to the cold breeze trickling into the room, Sakura looked up and met the lone eye of the man that had just entered. A black mask was pulled over the bridge of his nose and the symbol on the metal band wound around the side of his head confirmed to her of the current situation.

There was an old, cracked tea tray in his hands and the steam was quickly dissipating, so Sakura nodded to allow him entry, shutting the door behind her.

_So aside from the fact that you just saw another ghost, are we gonna do something about that dead body this man left in your uncle’s backyard?_

“Where are we, shinobi-san?”

Righting the tea table he pulled from the closet, the man had his other hand balancing the tea tray precariously. All the while, that lone eye never left her face.

“Haruno-sensei said you would know.”

The man tried to appear nonchalant, that much Sakura could tell, but in his efforts to uphold the civilians’ tradition of serving tea to a guest—are _you the guest? I mean, look at the way he hasn’t backed off of the door yet. You might trust them, Sakura, but_ I _— **but you would trust a dog?** —_but the tension that hung in the air between them was suspended. His awkwardness coincided with Sakura's current state of high-alert.

She took a few deep breaths to calm herself down. The man ‘killed’ her for a reason. Sakura knew what the reason was. It’s going to be fine.

She was still staring at him, however, because Sakura still can’t quite place him down as the person who she thought he was. The man she’d been looking for all this time, apparently, was dead.

Sakura had seen him die right before her eyes, an hour ago when they passed by the border of Frost Country. Two hours ago, when she looked up into the canopy of leaves and branches, she was sure that the same man standing in front of her now had been the same one Akisada promised that’ll meet her in his back gardens.

With the way he was looking at her now, however, Sakura wasn’t too sure. But, there was a hint of familiarity in the tone of his voice when he mentioned _Haruno-sensei, but why’d he call your uncle Haruno-sensei? Hey, are you even listening to me, you brat—_ but Sakura wasn’t too hard-pressed to remember the time she’d saw him last, standing like a wraith over the darkness and the dead, a stream of blood leaking over his closed fist, enclosed over the hilt of a knife like he was sorry for—

_Sakura._

_That’s enough._

_Take a breath._

Inner started to hum.

The melody vibrated throughout her head.

If Sakura hadn’t been trying to get her bearings together while calming her rapidly beating heartbeat at the same time, then she would’ve hissed at It to stop.

Sakura felt the humming was a touch sore after witnessing her own ‘murder’, with a body that looked too much like her own—

_Sakura._

A headache was starting to pound at the base of her skull, but the panic was over. Inner was humming again.

“You’re Konoha’s White Fang?”

The man paused in the middle of pouring, but only so minutely that Sakura would’ve missed it if she hadn’t been staring at him since he walked into the room.

“No,” cautiously, as if he was the samurai stalking a tiger, “I’m his son.”

Or maybe, it was Sakura who was the samurai, walking slowly and carefully along the tatami towards him. There, behind him, the sliding doors were still open, spilling both light and shadows from the hallway into the room.

Sakura noticed that the wooden floors beyond hadn’t been polished for a very long time. Bending down, her palm smoothed over the mat to pick up the orange. Mirroring his posture, Sakura purposely left herself vulnerable with her back against nothing but the open center of the room.

“Hatake-dono, my question was actually _why_ we’re in the Country of Lightning.”

In the ensuing silence, the tiger was the first to crack a smile at the samurai, but Sakura supposed that to the samurai, any smile from a beast would bare too much _teeth_.

* * *

Sakura felt blaringly hot, sitting there on the warm floor of Akisada-sama’s study.

What began as whispers of the incoming chill seemed to gain traction in the swirl of falling leaves behind Akisada-sama desk, and Sakura watched as the crack of the sliding door grow aflame with bright yellows and specks of red ochre. Setting her chin back onto the ground, Sakura tried once more to focus on the characters swirling on the scrollskin before her.

The weekend afternoons were a time when Sakura was at her most relaxed state. Inner was dozing peacefully on the other side of the mirror. And if she closed her eyes to search for it, Sakura would hear the tuneless melody of its breaths falling in line with the steady heartbeat of her own.

It’s been two years since Sakura was last frightened by Haruno Hanami appearing in the study’s closet, and now that she’s just turned seven, lying sprawled out on her stomach near the outer leg of Akisada-sama’s desk, Sakura was glad that she no longer felt the pressing urge to search for a pale figure sitting in the corner of the room or for a white futon half-pulled out of view from her position on the floor.

She never spoke of it out loud, never told Akisada-sama of meeting his dead wife and crying with her for an entire night, but Sakura doubted that Akisada-sama didn’t have an inkling of what transpired in his study when he wasn’t there.

For all the ensuing days, weeks, and months that she remained at his side, Sakura caught on quickly that Akisada-sama always had a system for where he placed his scrolls, the direction he set the string closures to face, the spot they were stacked into on his desk, the angle the stack was—

“Sakura, if it gets too cold, then feel free to close the door.”

The man didn't even pause from his reading to look down at her. Sakura was sure that he wouldn't be able to see her anyway, but still. The lack of effort peeved Sakura's nerves a little, as she was suddenly struck with an epiphany.

“Akisada-sama.”

Turning over onto her back, Sakura propped her legs up the side of his desk. They only reached halfway up the wood, the height of it imposing in comparison to the tiny stature of her lower body.

“You have a daimyo’s desk.”

Even without craning her neck to check, Sakura could feel Akisada-sama’s amusement rolling off of him in waves.

“How’s that scroll coming along?”

Being in his presence was something that Sakura cherished, and while she was content to stay the teacher's orphan-assistant, she wasn't blind to her reality. **_That's why_** , Sakura felt that she **_needed_** to do this. **_She needed to find out why they killed her father._**

She heard the moment that Akisada-sama’s fingers wrapped around his cup to lift it up, so she bent her knees sharply and pushed, flipping her legs over her body. As her torso rolled up and the ends of her hair went up and over her eyes, Sakura met Akisada-sama’s startled expression head-on.

Tea sloshed over the rim of the cup and dripped onto the desk.

“I want to be a ninja.”

Silence, once again, reigned in the study.

. . .

. .

There was always something about the shinobi that unsettled her.

Not that Sakura ever had an issue with them to begin with.

No, Sakura freely admits that she doesn’t understand **_why_** her clan hated the shinobi population— ** _just what was so wrong with the way forty percent of the human population lived?_** —but she understands that for the Haruno Clan, a clan like any other that’s often embroiled in its own power struggles, _it would be a dishonor worthy of suicide_ to depend on shinobi to fight their battles.

The samurai lived their lives in-contract to their blades, so the Haruno elders often urged sectors of the branch family to breed the sword with their children. Many main branch families interweave their cousins into the sprawling roots of the Clan— _only the best swordsmen were stationed at the foot of your Haruno heirs and heiresses,_ Inner once observed, _but they lived like servants just the same_ , effectively cutting off Sakura’s question on the tip of her tongue—but to Sakura, that system was no different to the Kages and their shinobi.

The biggest difference, the Haruno elders insisted, was that the ninja lived their lives in-contract to their pay. Their purpose was similar to that of a parasite, leeching off of the civilians to maintain the endless cycle of their entire system’s survival and any silver of the prescribed loyalty they have to their Villages was just that: as easily broken as coins of silver.

There might be an adequate case made by the elders about the purpose of human life or the morality of living for money and masquerading it as patriotism, but at six-years-old, Sakura couldn’t care less.

What does a civilian have to say in the way a shinobi lives? Is it not the same as the way some Haruno branches pick the pen over the blade, the high seas over the forest temples? In Sakura’s opinion, the civilians were no better than the shinobi; after all, the Hidden Villages were only a microcosm of the Daimyo’s fortress cities, and where the shinobi had Village loyalty, the ladder-climbing politicians and castle noblemen had only their word and inheritance to give for loyalty.

Inner, however, always fell quiet at Sakura’s inquiry into and growing support for the shinobi population. There was also an emotion that emanated from It during those moments, but Sakura felt that asking Inner what that emotion was would be cruel, especially when the majority of that emotion seemed to be made of regret.

Sakura could almost feel it now, wrapping around her and billowing out and about into the halls and gardens around them.

Perched on another ledge directly over the open window of the kitchens within the Nursery, Sakura let the gossip of the cooking servants wash over her. This time, their attention was on the warring clans in the Land of Fire, linked precociously by a man long dead but heralded as a god among men—and that was what grabbed Sakura’s focus because Sakura was now suspecting herself to be a victim: in both inheriting the soul of a possible goddess that shares her body and the missing piece of Haruno Kizashi who had mentioned Leaves in his last letter—and that one of this Haruno branch’s formerly strongest competitor in the world of traveling merchants had devolved into a handful of elders, a barren cousin, and a ninja.

In the billowing smoke from the oil fire and over the rising steam of slow-simmering vegetables, Sakura caught a name: The White Fang.

Later that evening, she snuck into Akisada-sama’s library, and despite it testing the fringes of her control, Sakura left Inner to slowly encircle the Nursery.

(Being so far away from her other self physically pained her at times, but Sakura could tell that as time went on, she could separate from Inner for longer periods of time, for a further distance than the last each time, so long as she kept urging Inner to cooperate.)

No, the Haruno Clan’s biased opinion of the shinobi never really bothered Sakura. What really bothered her was that Sakura knew that the ancient deity possessing her body seemed to **_regret_** the very idea of a shinobi.

Then quietly, in the moments when Sakura knew that she was truly alone, she began to wonder, **_Why would an immortal regret?_**

. .

. . .

“Sakura, is this about that night in the library?”

_Sakura gripped so tightly into Akisada-sama’s hakama that she hadn’t even realized that her hands had gone numb. There in the moonlight, Sakura only watched as a puddle of blood steadily grow and spread across the tatami._

“Akisada-sama, you’re going to have to be more specific than that. I spend many nights in your library.”

_The sheen of a blade—a short sword, Sakura vaguely remembered from Kizashi’s letters during his years in the east—reflected a white mask in the dark room. The lone candle that Sakura had snuck from her Nursery had quickly been blown out when she first saw the shadow of man approach Akisada-sama’s back._

“Sakura.”

_“Sakura?” Akisada-sama spoke first, and Sakura couldn’t remember when she had stepped out from crack of the screen door and physically into the room, until finally, in the lowest registers of her mind, she felt Inner awaken._

Akisada-sama pushed out of his seat and slowly approached her. Sakura only now noticed that she was shaking slightly, her fingers tightly gripping the fabric around her own leg. Gazing straight into Akisada-sama's stricken face, Sakura only noted that the pallor had taken on a similar color as the decapitated hand that flew at her that night.

_Blood poured from the wound. The knife that the assassin had been ready to stab into Akisada-sama’s back flew and clattered to the space between her open feet. A scream was sounding before Inner took care of it. The crunch of flesh and bone. Blood seeping from its jaws, before a tail swept it away._

_**How are you doing this, Inner?**_

_“I was not aware that your protégé had full control of the beast outside of her body, Haruno-sensei.”_

_Sakura looked over the shinobi in the room with them, a white dog mask covered his face, but it was almost like Sakura was entangled in the threads of fate, because she recognized him immediately._

_“How do you presume to know Akisada-sama, Konoha’s White Fang?”_

“Sakura,” it took Akisada-sama two brisk steps to her side once he noticed that she was shaking, “is this about that night in the library?”

Vaguely, Sakura felt him place a hand on top of her head.

“Or is this about your father?”

_When the shinobi took a step towards her, Sakura blinked and opened her eyes to her hands on Akisada-sama’s hakama in a death-grip._

_“At ease, Haruno-sensei, I do not sense any further ill intent outside us now.”_

Closing her eyes, Sakura went to check on the mirror in her head. Inner had woken but nodded confidently in her direction once she saw the girl standing before her. The two of them opened their eyes simultaneously, and the glow from their irises was so bright that it cracked the mirror again.

_“Although, Haruno-sensei, forgive me for being so forward, but instead of protecting the child, shouldn’t you be sacrificing her to the Clan elders instead?”_

_“It has only been a few years since I last took you into these knowledgeable halls, Hatake-san. Have you already forgotten my teachings about the differences among the civilian clans and the shinobi?”_

_Sakura only heard Akisada-sama relax by the tone of his voice, so she kept herself from speaking up…until the very end of that sentence, of course._

_“You underestimate me, Hatake-dono,” Sakura ignored Akisada-sama’s hand that came to rest against her back and instead, forced herself to gaze at the masked face head-on, “Sakura-sama and I are loyal to the same person as you.”_

_“Oh?” The shinobi finally relaxed, sheathing his short sword as the last tendrils of Inner Sakura’s essence slipped back into her body. “And just who is that?”_

“My father is dead, Akisada-sama.”

When Sakura felt her mentor wrap his arms around her, Sakura breathed in the smell of fall leaves and wet ink that permeated the air around them.

“Let me bear the burden of being the first Haruno to choose the shinobi arts, Akisada-sama.”

_“This is presumptuous of me, Hatake-dono, but I do not expect myself to be wrong.” Letting a smile grace her face, Sakura proudly unshielded herself from Akisada-sama’s body and stepped forward. “Aren’t we all loyal to the man who raised us over the mere place that houses us?”_

When Sakura stepped back, she mirrored the watery smile on Akisada-sama’s face and finally allowed her eyes to glow before him.

“Let me be the first Clan heiress to reclaim your honor.”

* * *

At the sight of the shinobi sitting now, Sakura wordlessly acknowledged the tentative truce between them.

**_Hey, you._ **

In her head, Sakura could feel the two of them peering out at the same time. Inner was laughing, but in such a way that grated her ears at the same time as it soothed her headache. Still, Inner was something _else_ to focus on, and for Sakura, distraction had too high a price to pay for the moment.

**_Take a walk._ **

She felt Inner’s eyes rolling in irritation, followed by a curse at her disrespect— _again_ —but Sakura was soon consumed by the heady thing that resulted for her, that feeling that was nigh impossible to describe, that moment when a soul leaves its body.

_Are you an idiot?_

The mirror was cracking again, she could hear it, but Sakura also knew that if she looked back—looked within herself to see it—the glass would be unmarred. 

_I mean, I’ve put up with your spur of the movement choices before, but honestly…_

The rush of wind roared within her ears, and Sakura almost smiled at its teasing. She physically couldn’t, of course, not with the shinobi there, still staring at her while debating what the proper protocol was in performing the final step of tea ceremony for a rival clan’s runaway heiress that he totally had a part to play in—

Sakura tossed the peel aside and watched as the man huff in amusement. Stuffing an orange wedge into her mouth, she rose casually to get her cup that he’s now finished pouring.

_…What’ve you learned for these last seven years aside from running around your sensei’s compound and playing tricks on your cousin?_

Sakura learned a long time ago that annoying Inner out of her head was a surefire way to finally have a few minutes to herself. The trick is to play on the opposite field—

_Listen, I didn’t stop you from offering yourself up to a wolf the first time around, but now you’re choosing to enter their pack, you’re tryn’ta play hooky with the escort, and you’ve no idea if he’s gonna eat you on the way, and you just want me to leave?_

—but stay on the same team.

 ** _I’ll be fine with you around, won’t I?_** Sakura bit out but It couldn’t sense the irony. Or, maybe It could, but nevertheless, Sakura only heard her own words echoed back to her from the now-empty chasm within the mirror.

Restless energy hummed throughout the room as she saw bits and pieces of Its scales swirl in circles around her. Humming quietly to herself— ** _if it was the same tune that Inner hummed earlier, then that’s no one’s business but her own_** —Sakura waited patiently for the tea in her cup to stop rippling before she took a sip.

Sakura was intrigued at the shinobi’s look of alarm, but he also had a hand on his thigh which she took note of it.

This is what makes the ninja different from the samurai, after all. **_The same scene played over twice, but they’ll always have the same reaction…_**

Inner must not have been able to trust the shinobi in front of them, for It to leave so quickly with such minimal prodding— ** _especially with how anyone could ditch the family crest and pick up a kunai nowadays_** —so Sakura wouldn’t blame Inner for the bias.

The Hatake name had been dragged through the mud, splintering in such a way that left both halves of the clan falling into disregard, and Sakura was—in **_a_** **_sense_** of the word— ** _lucky_** to have met the White Fang’s son as she did that day.

A few months ago, she was witnessing her first murder, fingers tightly wound in the fabric of Akisada-sama’s hakama, eyes closed, seeing nothing but hearing everything of the exchange between him and the shinobi standing before them.

Still sitting in front of the open doorway, the shinobi tensed suddenly, but Sakura was only highly amused at his look of alarm shot at her when Inner’s iridescent tail swept past them and into the hallway.

He would remain blind to the part of Sakura that she wanted him to stay blind to, and at the same time, she would allow him to see whatever it is about herself that she wanted him to see… It was that ability—the **_only_** ability that Sakura would admit she had, **_aside from her_ _luck, of course_** —that she could fully trust during this encounter— ** _or was this a transaction?_**

“Hatake-dono.”

“Yes,” the shinobi barely caught himself from stuttering, but Sakura was actually smiling at the way he paused before hurriedly tacking on, “Haruno-dono?”

“My question, you have still not answered it.”

“Ah, Haruno-dono, that’s…”

The way he scratched the back of his neck wouldn’t have been funny to her a few minutes ago, when the two of them were on-edge enough to kill each other.

“Never mind it, Hatake-dono.”

**_It’s funny how fear could both escalate and de-escalate a situation._ **

Holding out a piece of her orange, Sakura grinned—and then somewhere in the distance, on the fringes of her mind’s awareness, _that’s a grimace, you brat!_ —at the shinobi staring wide eyed at the peace offering. Behind her, Sakura could hear the sliding door opening by itself, and the whole thing was so **_funny_** to her that she started to laugh.

 _If I had a ry_ _ō_ _for every time you almost made a ninja piss themselves, Sakura, I’d have exactly one ryō._

The way that the divine energy reentered Sakura’s body was a soul coming home, a pair claws sinking into the space between her lower back and grabbing onto the sides of her pelvis to roost. Inner’s warmth numbed Sakura’s posture and blocked out the sharp caress of cold slipping into the room behind her. If she’d taken a glance back, she would’ve seen Inner’s tail reabsorb into the hem of her kimono.

**_Actually, you keep up with that bet—_ **

“Hatake-dono,” the man was still staring wide-eyed at her and Sakura had to raise her sleeve to hide her laugh from spilling out of her hand, “perhaps we should skip the pleasantries until we reach Konoha…”

**_—and maybe someday, I’ll make you rich._ **

“…Or maybe until you’re done with your mission here?”

That snapped the shinobi out of his daze, and the sudden seriousness that leapt across his face was a second mask that Sakura could now admit was what annoyed her the most when she first met him.

**_Never mind that people all over the Lands burn paper money to add to your good name._ **

When Inner and the shinobi hummed in agreement at the same time, Sakura had to physically press her kimono sleeve into the lower half of her face to stay silent.

“Yes, Haruno-dono, the latter would be best.”– _Damn right, you ungrateful brat, and don’t you forget it!_ I’m _the eternal, all-powerful deity here and I demand more resp **—**_ “Would you be opposed to staying here while I finish my mission?”

“That’s fine.”

“All right, but Haruno-dono,” For the brief moment that Sakura warred within herself, trying to grab onto the reins of control over her consciousness, over Inner Sakura, at the same time as Inner started to rant about the _poor living conditions in the mortal realm_ subjected to them thus far, there was a moment that if Sakura hadn’t been staring intently into the shinobi’s eye that she would’ve missed, a look of **_something_** crossed his face when she was trying to shove Inner back into the constraints of the mirror that she almost thought she’d misheard him when he said—

“If we’re actually going to go through with this, then please, call me Kakashi.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it’s not obvious by now, this fic is a complete destruction/re-evaluation of canon-Naruto. Most of the perspectives this fic will take on the whole shinobi vs. civilian trope is of a historically similar or Asian culture-referencing likeness of what canon-Naruto (imo) didn’t do well enough to highlight.
> 
> “Scrollskin” is a uniquely Asian word that I’m incorporating (read: adding into the English dictionary) into this story. In most Asian languages, the paper enfolding a scroll is called a “skin” as to one, refer back to the different types of material ‘paper’ used to be made from and two, to reference how most Asian cultures view scrolls as a unique-almost-soul-possessing entity that heralds the ‘incoming of knowledge’, similar to what the Westerners would call intellectual “enlightenment”. Most Asian cultures view scrolls as such a powerful object because, historically, only noblemen (and I mean, rich men) could afford an education (via private ‘educational apprenticeship’ under another learned nobleman), so to the eastern commoner, a scroll is both a useless thing and a priceless thing. (Also, if it’s not apparent by now: yes, I love doing my research, and yes, I am of Asian descent. But mistakes/competing opinions are always a possibility/always valid! Feel free to share in the comments as the fic goes on.)
> 
> I mention the use of silver as money here, which was common in East Asia. Japan was into silver mining around the 1600s (there even a battle fought over a silver mine by rival shoguns around the era), but due to increased competition (in mining), Japan came to rely on other countries for silver resources.
> 
> The short sword mentioned here that Kakashi wields is what the Japanese call a shōtō sword: medium-length swords that are longer than a knife (tantō) but shorter than a longer sword like a katana or tachi. Note that this is also a category of Japanese swords (examples of a shōtō sword would be a wakizashi or a kodachi) and not a specific sword. I do not mention what specific sword Kakashi is wielding because that will be explored later on (when Sakura learns to wield a sword), so let’s leave the spoiler at that.  
> . .  
> .  
> In the next couple of chapters (definitely by the end of this arc), I will explore the specifics on Sakura’s statement of being a Clan heiress, so stay tuned!


	5. Eventide iv

To many members of the Haruno Clan, Haruno Daisuke was very different from his brother, Haruno Daichi.

As it stands, Daichi-sama was the illustrious Clan head, and his **_older_** brother, Daisuke-sama, was merely a drunkard.

In Sakura’s opinion, Daisuke-sama the Drunkard would’ve been a better leader— _that’s treasonous thinking there, brat—_ because of his **_actions_** that gave him the upper hand— _not because he’s older?_

**_No, age has nothing to do with true wisdom, Inner._ **

_Hmph. A disrespectful brat like you_ would _think that._

For many members of the Haruno Clan, Daichi-sama was **_right_** to ignore the shinobi while they waged their third war— _would you have done the same?_

**_No._ **

_And why not?_

When Civilian Councils across the Hidden Villages petitioned for the Haruno Clan’s assistance in protecting their civilians, **_Daichi-sama waited until the second year of a world war to send his reply_**.

_Perhaps he had been waiting for something…_

_**While people were dying?**_

_Not_ his _people._

The merchant faction of the Haruno Clan will always protect its assets. The religious faction will await the judgement of the Old Ones and prepare for the Cycle to renew.

 _What a load of bullshit_ , Inner muttered in her head. Sipping the jasmine tea that she’d wrangled out of Akisada-sama’s personal stores, Sakura was more than happy to agree with It for once.

In Sakura’s humble opinion, it was the cleverness of the older brother, Daisuke-sama, to turn a proclamation of neutrality into a plan of attack. **That _is what saved the Haruno Clan from a complete fallout with the Hidden Villages._**

_Is that what you think?_

“Sakura?” Hurriedly slamming the clan records shut, Sakura looked up and into a close-up face of thinly-concealed excitement and pearly white eyes. “Are you my cousin Sakura?”

**_Inner, why didn’t you warn me someone was coming?_ **

_I did. Earlier. Before we got to the part about the Head taking no wives and having no children and stuff._

**_What?!_ **

“You’re my cousin Sakura! I’m so happy to finally meet a family member!”

Noticing the lack of two white circles over the shoulders of the blue-dyed kimono, Sakura forcibly pulled a polite smile out of the corners of her mouth and stood up. In a hurry, she hid the fiftieth volume of the Clan records in the folds of her kimono sleeve.

_The kid didn’t feel_ _dangerous to me…_

“Actually, the Haruno are _all_ family members. If we are not, then you should not be here.”

Dipping her head politely, Sakura stepped aside to leave when suddenly, both hands of her— _cousin? Are we completely sure of that?_ shot out to stop her. It took all ten of her fingers to keep the precious volume from slipping out of her hands.

“No, Sakura, you don’t get it!” **_Finally_** , Inner’s annoyance skyrocketed with her. “We’re _actually_ cousins! My father is your father's older brother!”

“Mitsukuni. Unhand your cousin.”

**_…Inner._ **

_Yes, yes, I know. That’s—_

“Daichi-sama.”

. . .

. .

The merchant-system of the Haruno Clan relied mostly on a network of producers and consumers.

Not one Clan merchant peddled the same merchandise twice in a year, and the products ranged from petty baubles to the sword that severed the last Fire daimyō’s head from his neck.

From the cloth weavers in the south to the iron-workers in the north, all industries of production likely dipped once or twice or many times into the hands of a Haruno or Haruno-allied merchant to traverse its journey.

And it was along those routes that Haruno Daisuke took to the advantage of warning the civilians that another battle would wage their area. (The shinobi forces, after all, still needed clothes to wear and kunai to wield, and thus, the Haruno traded secrets and missives as readily as they did salt and silk.)

While the samurai force within the Clan could not be commissioned to defend the civilians, being a samurai warrior himself, Daisuke-sama knew how to control his kind, playing their penchant for pride against them. On the eve of the war’s third year, Daisuke-sama effectively ‘unified’ their forces under leading generals of the daimyōs’ courts.

_Maybe ‘control’ isn’t the right word..._

**_How else would a so-called ‘drunk’ gain a shogun seat?_ **

_Maybe he just kept going back and forth with the ninja and annoyed the heck outta all of them._

“Sakura! Look!”

Sighing in tandem, the two of them stared at their _cousin—are we absolutely_ sure _you’re related to this little sh— **yes** —_as **_the_** **_cousin_** swung a much-too-expensive— _it’s also looking like it’s much-too-heavy—_ longsword around the impromptu ‘training field’.

_Ugh, that kid’s a blight in your sensei’s garden._

**_All_** **_cousins are a blight to begin with_**.

.

.

Back in his study, Haruno Akisada is trying his best to quell the Clan Head’s fury.

“How long has the girl been here?”

Quickly swallowing the sip of tea Akisada had fooled himself into thinking he could take, he shuddered to think of the people most likely to receive fallout from said-Clan Head’s fury.

“Ah, Daichi-sama, only recently after her allotted time at the Nursery...”

When the Head made no further comment except his unwavering stare that Akisada felt was piercing _through_ his skull, he supplemented, “…a-as in a year now, Daichi-sama.”

Scratch that last thought, he was receiving the fallout _now_.

“Ever since that useless brother of mine left?”

Silence permeated in the library until it was punctured by the excited cries of Haruno Mitsukuni, and all the while, his young charge’s distinct, angered responses radiated from the garden.

Akisada had never been as glad as he is _just now_ for keeping few servants in his House and developing the _good_ _habit_ of dismissing those of his students. If anybody heard the top two contenders for the Clan Head’s position rough-housing in the garden…

“The girl should come with me.”

Alarm shot through Akisada as he rushed to change the Clan Head’s mind.

“Daichi-sama! With all due respect, it would be improper for a girl—”

“ ** _I_ **deign what is proper.”

Sweat was beading along his temples now.

Akisada swallowed before trying again.

“Daichi-sama, if you claim the girl now, then the elders would truly forsake Kizashi-sama… I know he is in a bad position now, but Sakura would have the greatest amount of leverage if she could flourish _away_ from the main branch where—” and here, Akisada tactfully paused to clear his throat, “our _helpful_ elders couldn't easily… _influence_ her.”

Once his piercing gaze was averted towards the direction of the garden, Akisada finally took a breath.

He knew it was poor form to prod the bruises over the Clan Head’s heart but if that was what it took to keep his favorite student _uncorrupted_ , then—

“Fine. I will leave the girl with you.”

“Yes, Daichi-sama, that’s—”

“Along with Mitsukuni.”

.

.

“No, no! The fabled swings of Susanoo-sama’s Worochi no Aramasa goes **this** way, not **that** way! The dragon’s heads were drinking from the rice wine barrels at the gate, remember?”

“Cousin Sakura, you’re so smart! I completely forgot about the positions of the heads…”

“Wait! You’re leaning far too much on your left leg! You might strain it that way. Did you even **finish** practicing your katas before attempting this?”

“Oh, yeah! I completely—”

“Forgot about it like usual, didn’t you, Mitsukuni?”

Staring at her cousin in disbelief, both Sakura and Inner watched as the child boldly leapt and clung onto the torso of the samurai that suddenly appeared from the shadows of the garden. The heavy thud of the sword sounded against the grass while Sakura tuned out her cousin’s loud and over-the-top ramblings at the newcomer.

_Could this be Daichi-sama’s guard?_

**_Probably_**.

Mitsukuni’s body might’ve shielded the man’s features from Sakura, but she could still make out the two white circles on the shoulders of the kataginu. At this, Sakura relaxed—

_Ah, wait a minute, that’s—_

_—_ before tensing up again when she meets the dark red eyes of Haruno Daisuke.

.

.

_You know what? None of you guys look alike at all._

At the entryway of Akisada-sama’s study, Sakura nervously glanced between Daichi-sama and Daisuke-sama.

 _You and your weird pink hair and green eyes combo, the older brother’s got demon eyes, the Clan leader’s a brunette with blue eyes, your sensei might’ve won the genetic lottery with_ some normal _black hair and grey eyes, and—_

The tension was **almost** thick enough to keep her cousin quiet.

_—your cousin’s crazy._

**Al- _goddamned_ -most.**

“Sakura! Let’s play together every day!”

“With all due respect, cousin Mitsukuni-san, Akisada-sama’s House isn’t—”

“Sakura.”

“Sakura! You said you wanted to borrow a few of my scrolls on the Kusanagi. I have them along with a few others on the Seven Swordsmen. Go pick them up from the library. You know where I usually leave them for you, yes?”

“Ah, y-yes, Akisada-sama—”

“Well go on, then. Bring Mitsukuni with you! Take your cousin around the place for a bit.”

“Ah t-then, if you’ll excuse me, Daichi-sama—”

“Mitsukuni.”

“Yes, uncle?”

“Behave yourself for Sakura and your new sensei.”

“Yes, uncle!”

“Daisuke, come.”

“Let’s go, Sakura! I wanna show you my katas after. Even though uncle Daichi says they’re terrible, maybe you got a couple of pointers for me—”

Then few steps down the hall, “Mitsukuni, speak correctly.”

“Yes, uncle! Let me show you my katas after you take me around, Sakura! I’ll gladly listen to any comments you have for me about them!”

**_Inner, I’m beginning to think all of us are crazy._**

. .

. . .

“Well Sakura, what do you think?”

It was well into the evening when Sakura finally wheedled her way out of her cousin’s grasp. The child was put to bed by ‘Auntie Koishi’, a stern woman with tightly braided black hair that was wound into a bun at the back of head.

She held herself in a manner that was neither submissive (as one would expect of a nursemaid) or delicate (as one would think of when picturing Haruno Daisuke’s wife).

No, with the manner in which she stared down the child when Mitsukuni whined to sleep in the Nursery with her, Sakura would dare say that the woman might truly be an ‘auntie’ of hers after all. (And when Mitsukuni brazenly asked for an evening snack only to receive a paper door slammed in the face, Sakura would dare say that this ‘Auntie Koishi’ had a backbone that would put her on par with any legitimate sister of the Clan Head and head samurai.) _—Maybe she was scratched off the records like you were?_

Closing the door resolutely behind her, Sakura strode into the study and reached for the freshly poured cup of jasmine tea waiting for her on the edge of Akisada-sama’s desk.

“It was more peaceful with just you and me around.” _—What does that make me?!_

_**A terrible lookout.**_

**** _You ungrateful, little brat! I—_

Despite the warmth radiating off of him, Sakura could tell that the pause Akisada-sama took before speaking would soon tire her out again.

“Ah, but little Mitsukuni has been here before, don’t you remember?”

_Wait, Haruno Mitsukuni is_ that _kid Mi—_

_**No.**_

“I don’t.”

_Maybe some people_ do _come back, Sakura._

“If you say so, Sakura.”

**_They don’t need to._**

Turing her back on the once-more cheerful atmosphere in the room, Sakura ignored Inner purring in the back of her head and went to grab the scroll that was left at the outer desk corner on the floor for her. Unfurling it to where she stopped last, past the drawing of large gates and sea serpents, of swords and Sun Goddesses, Sakura started to read once more.

With the moon high in the sky, Akisada drew a blanket from the study’s closet before blowing out the oil lamp on his desk.

He was most certain that it was only in Sakura’s dreamscape that she would admit to remembering how she was loved by her family.

 _Most dearly_.

* * *

“Hey Sakura, today’s so pretty!” _—Oh, the Ruler of Heavens, this kid’s annoying as f—_ “Whatcha’ reading, cousin?”

**_Now you know how I felt._**

 **** _What does that mean?!_

“It’s a scroll on the Seven Swordsmen.”

Sakura amusedly watched her cousin’s crinkled nose take on a pug-like appearance. Tuning out Inner’s shouts of annoyance at the back of her head, Sakura went back to her stopping place on the scroll and got comfortable.

“Keep doing that, cousin Mitsukuni-san, and you’ll get wrinkles.”

According to her experience over the last few days, her cousin was going to start the day with a barrage of questions, and before ‘Aunt’ Koishi-san comes to drag the rambunctious child to their **_new_** usual routine of morning katas under the watchful eye of Daisuke-sama, her cousin Mitsukuni would have amassed an arsenal of requests to end the day with.

On the very first morning of the day Mitsukuni started living with Akisada-sama, Sakura had roughly three minutes of peace and quiet before her cousin ‘attacked’ her outside the Nursery doors, pulling her hand and half-dragging her into Akisada-sama’s House. Three separate servants who Sakura grew up greeting on her way to Akisada-sama’s eyed Mitsukuni with amusement that morning, so Sakura let her cousin’s wild ways be.

There was just something about Haruno Mitsukuni’s exuberance (which was a thing that Sakura usually **_abhors_** ) that made her complacent…

And it was not unlike the way that Sakura now feels for Inner…

That if Sakura wanted to, if she did nothing and just stood and watch, and let herself be pulled and dragged down this dirt path…

That she would soon grow comfortable to her cousin’s presence.

_Aren’t family supposed to be comfortable with each other?_

And Sakura couldn’t say anything to that.

“What’re you interested in a bunch of ninjas for?”

Setting aside the scroll, Sakura picked up the pot of tea between them and made to pour a cup. Far from a step to a tea ceremony, Sakura watched as the steam rose over the cup she poured before sliding it briskly across the table until it stopped in front of her cousin.

Her **main branch** cousin.

If her nursemaid could see her now, Sakura was sure that she’d get a rap over her knuckles for such a rude action…but as Sakura watched her cousin’s rapt attention on her face, pearly white eyes never straying from her, and in complete ignorance of the way in which she, a **throwaway child _of a side branch from a bastard father and a blood-tainted shinobi mother_** , just served tea to Haruno Mitsukuni, the **rightful heir _of the main branch whose ties to Clan head would one day serve the position on a silver platter to h—_**

 **** _It’s not that I don’t agree with your assessment…but what makes you think this kid’ll take it?_

“Cousin Sakura, I know this is probably coming outta nowhere, but I thought with your aptitude in scrolls and kata and stuff, you can go up against the Elders for the Head one day! So why show people you like ninjas when you know everybody hates them?”

_**Why wouldn’t our cousin take it?**_

**** _Because not everyone wants to be a leader, Sakura._

Sakura didn’t even know when she stood up. One second she was looking at the way her cousin’s cute little head tilted while rambling on again about how her reading materials being boring or useless and the next—

_Not like you._

And the next, she registered her burning palms that were placed squarely on top of the spilled tea slowly, slow ly s lo w l y dripping off the other end of the table . . .

“What did you just say?!”

**_What the hell did you just say?!_**

“Cousin Sakura! Your hands!! I’m gonna get a servant, wait a minute, don’t move!”

As Mitsukuni shoved the dark blue haori over her trembling hands, Sakura faintly registered the infernal cackling that echoed in the back of her skull.

In the corner of the room, two cups rolled to a stop.

.

.

“What happened?”

It was night.

The day had gone by muted and grey, colors washed out faintly until everything faded into the background, except for those pearly white eyes…

So white, that Sakura finally realized why she was growing so comfortable with her cousin so quickly…

“Why are you half-blind, cousin Mitsukuni-san?”

At the wry grin that twisted her cousin’s features, Sakura faltered when she noticed how Mitsukuni’s hand, upon picking it up off the floor, refused to let the fabric of the haori go.

“Call me Mitsuki, Sakura.”

It had dried over time, over the length of Aunt Koishi’s lecture during the morning on proper tea etiquette and preventing burn scars, over Akisada-sama’s worried gaze on the two of them throughout afternoon lessons, and until now, where a sizeable patch over the blue-stained fabric was a shade lighter than the rest of the haori…and when she sent it fluttering along the gentle wind and into her cousin’s room earlier,

It is night.

“Mitsuki?”

Jumping down from the slanted tiles that jutted out on Mitsukuni’s side of the roof, Sakura stepped lightly over the threshold of the open screen door and into the room. On this side of Akisada-sama’s House, the gardens were sparse and disparagingly tended to.

“Mitsumi? ‘Selfhood’?”

A few weeds jutted from the empty koi pond that held only still waters.

The rock garden was littered with footsteps, and now that Sakura took her eyes off of her cousin’s unrecognizable expression, she noticed how the sides of Mitsukuni’s tabi were shredded. The little rocks must have weathered through the socks and before Sakura knew it, she was kneeling over her cousin’s feet, her own white haori off her shoulders and into her shaking hands.

“No, Sakura. You remember, don’t you?”

It was the first time Sakura saw blood since—

“Stop. Why were you in the garden? Don’t you know the rocks are only for decoration?” **_Why is there so much blood?_**

“Is there anything else that you’ll keep ignoring, cousin Sakura?” **_Why won’t it stop?_**

“What?” **_How do I get it to stop?_**

“I said,” she was still shaking until she felt her cousin take over, bending down over her with warm hands placed on her forearms and pulling, p u l l ing, dragging her up until she’s staring right into those pearly white eyes, “Cousin Sakura, is there anything else that you’re gonna ignore about yourself in the future? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure your hands are still hurt and you’re trying to rip your haori for me.”

**_How do I fix this?_ **

“ **Mitsuki** _—_!”

“Ah, so you _do_ remember me, Sakura!”

. . .

. .

_Hey brat, stop crying._

“I’m not.”

It was sunny when her father left, and she was four years old.

Her nursemaid was kind until she wasn’t, and that was when Sakura found out that money could be powerful. ( ** _It makes sense ‘cause that’s why her father left and her nursemaid stays._** )

Meeting Inner at just five years of age told Sakura that she was ( ** _probably_** ) very unlucky. The scrolls she started stealing— _borrowing— **borrowing**_ from Akisada-sama told her that normal people ( ** _people_** **_unlike her_** ) will either kill monsters ( ** _like_** **_her_** ) or trick goddesses into favors ( _like me?_ ).

Either way, she was doomed ( ** _yes, like you_** ).

On the day she turned six, Sakura started drinking a cup of tea in the morning and pretending that she was the only one who had ever lived in the Nursery.

And in a way, she was.

_It’s not like the kid won’t come back._

“They never come back.”

_I keep telling you, brat,_ this _is what makes Us different from Them._

_**Because I still have you?**_

_Because you’ll_ always _have me._

. .

. . .

_Huh, so the dark red eyes thing was just a sham, huh?_

_**What are you talking about?**_

Gulping nervously, Sakura tried to subtly wipe the side of her face without moving. She should’ve known that Daisuke-sama was around and probably on high-alert as she’d just burst into his child’s room through the roof without any warning.

“Why are you crying, Sakura?”

“I’m no—! Wait, how can you even tell??”

In the corner of her eye, Sakura saw Haruno Daisuke twitch.

_Ugh, he’s just like an overprotective puppy. I thought for the head of the samurai faction in the Haruno Clan, he would’ve had more bite. How in the universes did this guard dog unite the Samurai Factions_ and _the Cartographers?_

“You’re absolutely hilarious, Sakura! If you weren’t crying just now, then I wouldn’t felt something wet drop onto my hand! Besides, you’re standing pretty close to me now, and I can still kinda see your face and everything, even if it’s a bit blurrier than before and—”

“Shut up! It’s all **your** fault for pacing around in a **rock** garden.”

When Haruno Daisuke filled the room with low rumbling laughter, Sakura just **_now_** noticed that her light, last layer of white yukata was **_probably not_** the definition of propriety, and as such, she **_probably_** should not have been the one to lecture the man’s child to his face.

As he slowed to a chuckle, Sakura felt warm when her uncle placed a large hand over the top of her head.

“This Clan just might regain its honor yet.”

And with another smirk in their direction, Daisuke-sama stepped out of the room and back into the garden shadows. When Sakura absentmindedly tugged on her cousin’s bandaged feet, she saw her world tip up and slide sideways as Haruno Mitsukuni— _I can’t believe your Mitsuki grew into such a happy kid!—_ **Mitsuki** pulled her onto the futon.

_**I can’t believe you were with me for that long...**_

_Trust me, brat, I can’t believe it’s only been two years._

As Sakura slowly started to calm down while listening to her cousin’s steady breathing, a quiet contented sigh broke the still night.

Sleepily she heard the jumbled words, “told ya’ I’ll come back, ‘kura,” and smiled.

“Yes, I always **hoped** you would.”

_Ugh, the two of you are gonna make me puke._

.

.

That night, she was walking.

Inner let the silence in their world be, and for once, no story accompanied her path into her mind and mirror. Following thus, Sakura kept the world within as it was when she first walked into the glass.

Down the blood red river and deep into that starry night sky, Sakura finally noticed that something wasn’t quite **_right_** in her six-year-old brain, and it wasn’t because of the mirror that housed a dragon in it.

The void that Sakura felt, that vastly endless place that made her feel so distinctly different than anyone else she’s ever met, shaped and molded for her a view of the world that was two steps _off_.

Somewhere behind the way she came, Sakura knew Inner was grinning.

_Tell me if I’m wrong, brat…_

The void had been small before, Sakura knew it and saw it on those nights that she buried Kizashi’s letters in the depths of her closet, **knew, saw, and** **ignored it** on those nights when she fell asleep with whispers of Earth Country’s climate only to hear them again through her dreams as Inner’s stories.

_…but this world’s growing too small for you, I think._

Now, standing next to the void, everything was a faint echo. Inner’s words floated down from above, and just for a moment ( ** _just for a moment_** ), Sakura believed it when It first told her that she housed a goddess.

A few inches off-center, Sakura stared at the pool swirling around her legs, **_blood red, blood red,_** and watched as snapshots of all her precious people—the sensei who gave her books and took her in, the cousin who _really did_ come back, the servants who allowed her tea and scratchy records, the gardener who always turned a blind eye to the rooftops at night—seemed to be living in a world so _off_ of her own.

_When are you going to stop pretending that it isn’t?_

**_I’ll stop when I have to._**

* * *

Sakura first noticed that something was wrong with Haruno Kizashi when his letters had parts that were missing.

Not so much that they were redacted by an outside entity, but rather that when Kizashi— _you really should call him dad or something—_ mentioned in his letter from the Land of Waves that he was sending a kodachi with the next letter _—I mean, I get it, kid, you have abandonment issues, but you should try to understand that he’s out there for you, really—_ the next letter would come without the short sword.

_Wait, are you even listening to me, kid?_

Normally this wouldn’t worry Sakura as much as it should, for the road that goods travel is often fraught with thieves and other dangers.

But what was distinctly unlike Kizashi— _hey! What’d I say about the disrespect? First, you’re ignoring me, and now you’re—_ was that as a traveling merchant, he was not unaware of such dangers and should have taken the necessary precautions in ensuring that Sakura would receive the kodachi.

Kizashi was smarter than that and quite frankly, he was a man of his word when he gave it. In his last letter weeks ago, Kizashi wished her a belated happy birthday and told her that seven was a lucky number that deserved a **lucky** gift. ( _Bit ironic that gift had the terrible misfortune to go missing, hm?)_

What was even **_curiouser_** to Sakura was that a few weeks later, a kodachi **_did come_** but not in the ways she’d expect it to be delivered…

A talking pug came with it.

. . .

. .

“Hey, you Kizashi’s kid?”

Sakura looked up to see a dog leaning against the rice paper door.

“I’ve never seen a dog wearing a vest before… That headband’s from Konoha, yes?”

_Hey, kid, I don’t think talking to a ninja summons is a good idea._

“Not bad, kid! You’re pretty smart.”

“Thank you, summons-san.”

“The name’s Pakkun, and my human found this sword on the side of the road. It had your address on it, so now I’m here.”

The dog made a big show of dropping the package on the floor and scratching his ears. As he pushed the wrapped sword towards her, Sakura did not miss the way he leaned over and eyed the candle.

“Shouldn’t it be way past your bedtime?”

Sakura smiled. Placing a hand on the side of her chest that Inner’s tail was fluttering in, she blew out the meager bits of the candle that had been doing its best to light the room. Plunging the room in semi-darkness, Sakura didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust before making just as a big of a show as the dog and standing up, walking towards her closet with her back turned.

“These ledgers aren’t going to read themselves, Pakkun-san.”

Opening the doors, Sakura knelt by them and made sure to keep her figure unhindered in the pug’s perusal of the closet’s contents. She could feel Inner’s unsettling quiet as It trembled in rage.

“Would you take this back to your summoner for me, Pakkun-san?”

Taking the last candle out of her personal stores and wrapping it in a piece of cloth, Sakura also made sure to grab the wooden tōdai stand and the small bowl of leftover oil.

“I would like to thank him for the trouble that the shinobi went through in having you bring the sword to me.”

The pug’s features were half hidden in the shadows, but with his back to the moonlight, Sakura could just make out the twitch of his ears and the wrinkles over his brow that raised slightly.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a child of the Haruno Clan could get her hands on imported warōsoku. But tell me, Haruno Sakura, how did someone like _you_ get her hands on the last sword commissioned from the Demon Swordsmith of the Mist?”

The mirror in her mind was rattling. Both of them had heard the “ _civilian like you_ ” loud and clear, but Sakura had been trying her best to placate the proud entity in her head for years. She had more than enough experience to placate the upturned nose of another.

Lighting the wick of her oil lamp, Sakura released a laugh as she sat down again. Deliberately turning her side to him, she nonchalantly placed the wrapped candle in front of the pug and forced her eyes back on the ledger.

“Is that what all the shinobi call him?” Glancing at the pug once more, Sakura noted his head tilt and the further-raising of the wrinkles over his brow. “With all due respect, Pakkun-san, I am most disappointed in you. As a summons, I’d have expected you to know that it was only a myth.”

“What’re you tryin’ to say, kid?” Flipping over to the next page, even Inner eventually noticed the careful way in which Sakura kept her posture relaxed and her eyes off of him.

_You’re going to be the death of me, brat._

Turning Its head inward and back into the mirror, Sakura felt the body of the dragon settle in her frame, claws tucked against the insides of her shoulders and pelvis. As Inner went back to sleep, Sakura relaxed further into her position on the floor.

“You know, the story of him selling his soul to birth the seven swords of the Mist.” The pug mirrored her posture and sat down. As he lowered his head onto his paws, Sakura spotted his confused but enraptured expression in the corner of her eyes and continued. “He was just a really good swordsmith.”

“What about the part that he bled over the swords every night to feed their hunger? Isn’t that what eventually got him?”

“Oh, that? Nope. Even most of us civilians know that he probably had a fūinjutsu specialist work the metal beforehand to get the blades to eat chakra. Now, about the bleeding . . .”

Hours later, the pug stretched and picked up the wrapped candle in his jaws.

“You know what, kid, you’re not so bad.”

Sleepily, she smoothed over the slightly crinkled cover of the last ledger that Akisada-sama entrusted her with and cleared her hoarse throat.

“Not so bad for a civilian?”

With a paw out the door, Sakura only blearily made out the sharp stream of sunlight that lit over his amused expression. The sharp glint that reflected off of his headband sent Sakura’s arm up and over her eyes as she finally allowed herself to succumb to sleep.

“Nah, kid. For being a host.”

Pausing at the paper door, the pug turned around and suddenly trotted back in. Dropping the candle by her hand and trading it with the other package, Sakura smiled as the dog swiped his tongue across each of her wet cheeks once before straightening with the far more precious cargo in his jaws.

“I’m sorry about your father, kid.”

While Sakura had been too sleepy to acknowledge the parting words of the pug, Inner was just waking up for the sendoff. Confident that the child was _for once_ truly asleep, Inner moved up and out of Sakura’s body, the tips of her horns rising out of pink hair and stopping until the entire head of shimmering scales was raised a few inches above Sakura’s own.

The two Beings of Old faced each other and the Younger dipped its head.

. .

. . .

“So, let me get this straight.” Sakura nodded sleepily at Akisada-sama while she shuffled the ledgers back into their correct order on the floor. “You told Mitsuki yesterday that you’ll deliver these ledgers back into my study by seven this morning, told _me_ yesterday that you’ll be delivering them this evening to me, and are now actually delivering them to me right now. At four in the morning. A whole day late?”

In the corner of Akisada-sama’s study, Daisuke-sama sat with a cup of tea and his best attempt at controlling his laughter.

Inner snorted. _I told you not to trust the pug. He brought you nothing but bad luck, and— **ah, but he also brought me a sword, remember?**_

“Actually Akisada-sama, I really did mean to bring you these ledgers this morning—uhh, **earlier** , but I got distracted last night when a talking dog appeared, and we ended up discussing how the honored tradition of storytelling could get warped when it’s passed down through the mouths of outsiders so that’s why—”

Suddenly, Daisuke-sama interrupted her mumbling with a grin. “Mitsuki already told him that you overslept this morning.”

“Ah, but that can’t be, Daisuke-sama!” Straightening her posture with a smile, **_I’m gonna murder my cousin_** , Sakura noted to herself against the backdrop of Inner’s scoff ** _._** “You knew that I was outside in the hallway for Akisada-sama’s first batch of classes this morning!”

_Now, what about the pug?_

Utilizing the best smile in her arsenal, Sakura physically challenged Daisuke-sama to contradict her words. Mentally, she applauded herself for choosing the one with **teeth** as he settled back into his tea and nodded in Akisada-sama’s direction.

**_That remains to be seen._ **

“Precisely, Sakura.” Bending down to collect the ledgers, Akisada-sama rolled one up and whacked her on the head with it. “You shouldn’t make it a game to tease your cousin so, especially when you made the child as worried as to run all over the compounds looking for you like a headless chicken.”

“But Akisada-sama! Mitsuki **likes** being teased!”

“That’s because Mitsuki is lonely, Sakura.”

Grimacing at her uncle’s seriousness, Sakura grabbed the batch of ledgers in Akisada-sama’s hands and stood up.

“Sakura—”

“Mitsuki must learn to get over it.”

Shuffling towards her uncle to place the stack in her arms next to him, Sakura turned around only to meet Akisada-sama’s disapproving stare. The way Daisuke-sama shifted to look at the ledgers, however, told her that she now held both men’s undivided attention.

“I’ve checked the Clan records, and no one— **not a single person** —was going blind around age **seven**.”

_See? Lucky number, my a—_

“Those records, Sakura…”

Across the room, Akisada-sama sighed but nodded his head at the suddenly serious samurai.

— _Wait a minute! The higher ups don’t know you read them?_ _Then what the_ _heck do they expect a Clan heiress to do with her free time?!_

Sakura hesitated to turn around, until she did and stared right into the unwavering eyes of her uncle. Just as quickly as she was hesitant, Inner’s fury replaced it in equal measure.

“The records told me that no one has **ever** had such a condition. These ledgers tell me that they’ve given up on treating Mitsuki’s condition— **no** , **your** **Haruno** **Mitsukuni’s** condition.”

As the elder Haruno slowly stood up, Sakura kept her back straight and eyes deep into the **_blood red, blood_** red looking back.

“The Clan has run out of options to treat Mitsukuni’s condition.”

“ ** _I let Haruno Mitsukuni be taken from the Nursery with two functioning eyes,_ _so why is he back without them?_** ”

“Sakura, this is a genetic disorder—!”

“Akisada-sama, I already **said** **_I’ve checked the damned records!!_** ”

_Sakura._

 _Breathe_.

A humming sounded in the back of her mind, and when Sakura blinked her eyes, she felt the fog clear from her head. As the mist lifted from her eyes, Sakura saw for herself the shadows that lengthened in Haruno Daisuke’s eyes.

And from that, she grew assured.

Lowering her voice, Sakura tried again.

_It is absolutely crucial they are swayed to your side._

_Once you leave, Sakura, the distance will test their loyalty._

_**I won’t beg for it.**_

“Daisuke-sama, it was the Clan Elders who took Haruno Mitsukuni the first time, but it was **_my_** **_Mitsuki_** who chose to come back **and this time, I will not let my hope be blinded**.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, Sakura…”

As Sakura started walking towards the nearest exit, she could feel Inner release for her the breath that was caught in her lungs. Cinched at the base of her throat, it had been ramming against it so harshly that Sakura feared she was going to choke.

“…It sounds like you’re leaving.”

Pausing at the study door, Sakura turned one more time to meet the two men, **_these two men that she will be entrusting her favorite cousin’s life to when she leaves_**. Taking on a formal stance by the door, she knew when Daisuke-sama straightened his posture into that of the old samurai warrior that he was **_and still is_** , that he was now finally, **_finally_** taking her seriously.

So, she closed her eyes.

A few months ago, she was witnessing her first murder, fingers tightly wound in the fabric of Akisada-sama’s hakama, eyes closed, seeing nothing but hearing everything of the exchange between him and the assassin— ** _no, no, a_** _shinobi_ —standing before them.

“Tell me, Akisada-sama, which form of storytelling is best for its legitimacy?”

Even with her eyes closed, Sakura could feel Akisada-sama take a shaky breath. In her mind’s eye, Inner was staring back at her with triumph, but in a corner far removed from the mirror, a corner that she’d been using to bury the missing ( _but Mitsuki’s back? **they never stay** )_ and the dead ( _mother? **mother**_ ), Sakura turned and left the knowledge that she’d made her sensei ( _you never used to call him that **I can call him that now**_ ) cry ( ** _because_** **_I broke his heart_** _yes but it’s not the end just yet_ ).

( _It’s only heartbreak when people cry at the end._ )

“When the primary sources are dead and gone, should the story be trusted to outsiders passing it down from word-of-mouth or the government officials passing it down from pen-to-paper?”

_It’s been two years since Sakura was last frightened by Haruno Hanami . . . and now she’s just turned seven._

“Sakura,” the tinge of alarm in his broken voice made her pause, “ _who_ was the dog last night?”

_“My father is dead, Akisada-sama.”_

“You always told me that using either method, stories soon become myth when silvers of lies mix with the truth.”

_“Let me bear the burden of being the first Haruno to choose the shinobi arts, Akisada-sama.”_

“So, when that happens, Akisada-sama, is it not the job of a Haruno to right the wrongs and kill the rot?”

.

.

From the center of the room, Sakura heard her sensei sit down. Inner was laughing again.

“Akisada.”

It seems he remembers the conversation they had a few nights ago, when she confessed to him her father’s death and her goal. Or, at the very least, **_the first half_** of her goal.

“You’re now no longer my student, Sakura.”

_Let me be the first Clan heiress to reclaim your honor._

“As Clan Head one day, you’ll be my elder, so call me Akisada.”

It truly did seem that time moved differently ever since she felt Inner’s presence. When Sakura opened her eyes, it was morning.

* * *

This was the end of Akisada’s garden, and Sakura was about to barrel through the archway until—

_So, it didn’t lie, after all?_

“Shut up.”

Sakura finally stopped walking, broken out of her trance now, and stared at the roots of the cedar trees. Grown twisted and gnarly from the vines that both seemed to pierce **through** and choke the roots, Sakura finally started to feel perturbed at the eerie likeness of the vision Inner showed her in their mind with the real thing now in front of them.

“Stop calling her an ‘it’.”

_Like how you call me?_

“Stop it!” Sakura hissed.

Looking around, she noted how tall the trees were, whose lowest branches still towered over her seven year old figure. What also caught her eye, however, were the areas of bark a few hands above her head that were eerily smooth…

Stalking closer to the cedar tree closest to her, Sakura noticed that in between the streaks of tawny brown and umber cascading down the trunk, there were miniscule fissures in the wood.

**_Cedar trees don’t leak sap, Inner._ **

_The fissures?_

**_Uneven pressure._ **

_Silky smooth bark above your head?_

**_Pressure continuously applied on the bark that happens to be at the perfect height for an adult’s...foot._ **

_A running leap?_

_**That’s what it seems like.**_

**** _…So the good ole’ civie sensei were training ninja, huh._

**_Or just one for a very long time._**

Sakura looked up into the trees and saw a figure sitting in its branches.

He bore three swords and had _blood red, blood_ red eyes.

_Not bad, brat, but wrong guy._

“Daisuke-sama?”

This hadn’t been the man who Akisada— ** _I get the feeling that you’ll still call him Akisada-sensei in private-_** _No, Inner, I’ll fulfill his last request_ —hinted was going to be here, waiting to spirit her away so she could find Kizashi— _your father, Sakura, you can call him that now— **just** **because he’s dead?**_ —’s body.

When the samurai leapt down _with nary a jostled leaf, what, does the Clan’s shogun know of chakra, too?_ —Sakura startled as the elder thrusted the sword in his hands before her.

“You have the kodachi my brother sent you, but you do not have this.”

_How does he know the sword was a message?_

_**Only the person who the pug handed it to would know…**_

To call it a sword was Sakura’s last stand on being polite to her favorite of the brothers.

 **** _I trust the pug, Sakura._

 _**And I trust**_ **him _._**

The blade was wrapped in scraps of animal leather that had been flipped inside-out so the thicker side of the hide stayed tight around the metal inside and the softer side could be strapped to bare skin on the outside.

 **** _…The ninja?_

_**No, Daisuke-sama.**_

Sakura was no fool.

Just as she knew that Kizashi’s kodachi was his final message to have Sakura **fight** her way to power, Daisuke-sama’s tantō was his way of offering her the same.

After all, the honor regained in committing seppuku lies in the respect one must first earn.

In his own way, Daisuke-sama was acknowledging her…

“Thank you, Daisuke.”

…and for a samurai, that meant Sakura was one step closer to her goal.

.

.

Later, when the White Fang finally appeared in the canopy of leaves and branches, Sakura was already staring up at him. The shinobi didn’t say a word as he pulled a scroll from underneath his cloak, so she waited for the kodachi to land at her feet.

His hands blurred through a series of hand signs, and she barely managed to contain a full body shiver as a child’s body appeared in his hands— ** _blood red, red blood in her hair, blood red_ pink _hair_** — Inner didn’t bother to shield her eyes from watching the limp hand that flopped over the edge of her vision, pale and white, after the shinobi carelessly dropped the body to the ground.

Sakura heard its sloppy slide down the tree, but at least he was kind enough to drop it on the other side of the trunk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2021.01.22 Author’s Note:
> 
> Refresher: Daisuke (大典) = “big, law/rule/ceremony”. 
> 
> Daichi (大地) = “big, earth/all-encompassing”. This name is usually reserved for first-born sons.
> 
> ☆ NEW ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Haruno Mitsuki is revealed! ☆  
> • Mitsukuni (充國) = “filled with, country”.  
> • Mitsuki/Mitsumi (充己) = “filled with, yourself/selfhood”.  
> • Mitsuki (充希) = “filled with, hope”. 
> 
> In Japanese mythology, Susanoo no Mikoto (スサノオ) was a god of the sea that wields the sword Worochi no Aramasa (蛇之麁正) when defeating the Yamata no Orochi (八岐大蛇), a legendary dragon that had eight heads and eight tails. In one of its tails, Susanoo discovered the legendary sword, Kusanagi no Tsurugi (草薙の剣), which he gifts to Amaterasu Ōmikami (天照大御神), the goddess of the sun and universe.
> 
> The kamishimo (裃) is a formal outer-layer garment worn by the samurai that is made up of a kataginu (the “kami”, a sleeveless top with exaggerated shoulders) and hakama (the “shimo”, pleated pants). The samurai would wear a kimono and wear the kamishimo as the outer layer. An obi sash goes around his waist and keeps his two swords strapped on either side.
> 
> And here we have the illusive Auntie Koishi that was briefly mentioned in chapter two with Daisuke: Koshi (恋只) = “love, only”. Her backstory will come along in bits and pieces, someday.
> 
> Tōdai (燈臺) in ancient Japan was a simple wooden stand that had supports on the top to carry a bowl with oil in it. Rapeseed (plant belonging to the cabbage/mustard family) oil is most commonly used (as it is also very cheap), and a simple piece of oil-soaked cotton fiber would work as the wick.
> 
> Warōsoku (和蝋烛) are traditional Japanese candles that are made completely handmade out of vegetable matter. The wick is also hand-coiled with Japanese paper and laboriously wrapped with fibers of the grass that makes tatami and cotton fibers. Usually now used for Buddhist alters, people who light warōsoku in ancient Japan for ledger-reading like Haruno Sakura does in this fic are either foolishly rich or heretically spoiled. In this case, Sakura is both.
> 
> In case anyone is confused: the Haruno Clan records are basically this huge book / series of books that accounts for all members of the clan. Every relative is listed in this book, and I drew inspiration from the genealogy books of China’s zúpǔ (族譜) and Korea’s jokbo/chokbo (족보). Much of China’s historical zúpǔ was destroyed post-Communist Revolution, but Korea still uses their historical jokbo, which only the firstborn son of the line inherits and is allowed add to the book(s). In modern Korea, the book is not as heavily relied upon or legally binding as it had been. (Side-note: India and Ireland also have their own versions of genealogy registers). In this fic, the Clan records are entrusted to Haruno Akisada for a reason. Why no one bats an eye at Sakura reading them is because she is the (contested) heiress. What Daisuke DOES bat an eye at is Sakura reading the Clan ledgers, which are basically the basic record-keeping books of all sources of money that flows in and out of the Clan. I’ll explain how the Haruno Clan keeps up this system in later chapters, but historically (in eastern culture), the (first or main) wife of the household is in-charge of going over / adding to them. These ledgers are boring (as they’re accounting related), and the implications of a Sakura going over them is…well . . .


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